Talk:Shakespeare authorship question

The road to FA

Although I've been over this thing a hundred times, I still find little errors every now and then, but fewer and fewer, and I really don't think there's anything substantial left to do. I've pinged Nikkimaria for a ref formatting review before we take it to WP:FAC as soon as the arbitration is over (unless I'm permabanned from Wikipedia, but then I won't care anymore). I personally think this is the best short article about the SAQ I've ever read anywhere, and it will be a good resource for people looking for a reasonably concise explanation about the topic. Thanks to all for the hard work and input, and by all means bring up any problems you see in the article. I'm not gonna look at it for a few days so I can read it with fresh eyes next week. Cheers all! Tom Reedy (talk) 03:41, 4 February 2011 (UTC)

And here are my comments - although note that I'm only looking at reference formatting, not anything else. However, this might be helpful to you for manual of style details.

• You will likely run into objections about the extensive use of quotes in footnotes. It's up to you what you do about that, just thought I'd warn you. If you end up keeping them, make sure they are completely accurate (does Kathman really use "antiStratfordism", or is there a space/hyphen missing?)

For what it's worth, Kathman uses the form "antistratfordian" (no internal cap) on his Shakespeare Authorship Page website. Someone who has Wells and Orlin handy (which includes Kathman 2003) should check this. --Alan W (talk) 02:29, 6 February 2011 (UTC)

• You might consider making References two columns
• "Love 2002, pp. 87, 200)" - what's the parenthesis for? Nothing. An obvious typo. Fixed.
• "Baldwin 1944; Quennell 1969, p. 18" - Baldwin page(s)?
• "Shapiro 2010, pp. 255 (225)" is only one page (even if two editions) - there are a few of this type of error

I think I've caught and fixed all these, but hard to be sure with things like this. --Alan W (talk) 03:39, 6 February 2011 (UTC)

• "Saunders 1951, pp. 139–164; May 1980, p. 11." - careful about page range consistency: elsewhere you notate such a range as 139–64

I think I've got all these now. --Alan W (talk) 03:15, 6 February 2011 (UTC)

• " Chambers 1930, pp. II: 218–9." - is this a multivolume work? If not, what does "II" represent? If so, the other footnotes to this source need volume indications

Could this be a typo for "pp. ii, 218–9"? Don't have this book handy, or I would check. --Alan W (talk) 05:32, 6 February 2011 (UTC)

• "Shapiro 2010, pp. 271 (238–9).; Chambers 1930, p. 224." - nitpicking on this one, but for consistency there shouldn't be a period before the semi-colon. Also, I'm not sure about "p." vs "pp." in this case, given that it's only one page in the primary edition - that's an issue you might want to take a brief look at

I've changed this as suggested. ("pp." to "p.", which I think is correct here, as the "p." refers explicitly to the "271" , "pp." is implicit in the parenthetical page numbers; at least that's my opinion.) I can appreciate nitpicking. I've made a living by it for many years. :^) --Alan W (talk) 05:32, 6 February 2011 (UTC)

• Current note 103, "Claremont McKenna College 2010", seems to not be linking to its reference entry properly
• Be consistent in the use of "quoted in" versus "quoting" (and the resulting citation order)
• Another nitpick, but be consistent whether there is or is not a space between the colon and the quotation mark in footnotes where you quote the source
• "Shapiro 2010, pp. 83–9 (73–9):"The shock waves of Strauss's work soon threatened that lesser deity Shakespeare, for his biography too rested precariously on the unstable foundations of posthumous reports and more than a fair share of myths." (p. 84 [74-5])." - other multi-page citations with quotes don't seem to include secondary page numbers
• "Gross 2010, p. 40; Schmucker 1853." - Schmucker page(s)?
• "Holmes 1867; Halliday 1957, p. 176." - Holmes page(s)? Stopping here to say that a few of the footnotes in the last column need page numbers
• Wall Street Journal is a publication not a publisher, and should be italicized Fixed.
• Be consistent in including or not including publisher location
• be consistent in including or not including retrieval dates for weblinks to print-based sources
• Be consistent in including or not including publisher for journals
• Check for doubled periods caused by citation templates
• Be consistent in whether retrieval dates abbreviate months or not
• Don't switch between different citation templates, as the output is slightly different. You're using both {{cite book}} and {{citation}} - pick one (probably the former, based on numbers) and stick to it
• Be consistent in what is wikilinked when. Are you going to link things in references on first occurrence only, or every time? What parameters will be linked?
• Be consistent in titling - for example, The Tennessee Law Review, or just Tennessee Law Review?

I'm headed offline shortly, will do more tomorrow. Nikkimaria (talk) 04:44, 4 February 2011 (UTC)

The reason some of the books don't have page numbers is because the refs were converted from the external Google book page link that were in the article, so it merely marks the publication of the book. Should those stay or go? Tom Reedy (talk) 05:28, 4 February 2011 (UTC)

I'm not sure I follow your explanation - can you clarify? Nikkimaria (talk) 13:22, 4 February 2011 (UTC)

Re {{Cite book}}: Xover has fixed A–M of the refs by changing {{Citation}} to something more appropriate, and expanding retrieval dates, and more. Exceptions: Cressy, David (1975) and Crinkley, Richmond (1985) are still {{Citation}}.

Inconsistency: "Dictionary of World Literature – Criticism, Forms, Technique" has an en dash, while "Routledge Library Editions — Shakespeare" has an em dash. Johnuniq (talk) 07:38, 4 February 2011 (UTC)

At some stage soon we should go through the criteria carefully, with some of us playing the role of devil's advocate. Poujeaux (talk) 12:54, 4 February 2011 (UTC)

Continuing the list...

• Kroeber 1993 is in References but not in Footnotes; same with Law 1965, Lee 2010, Nelson 1999, Rosenbaum 2005, Wells 1997
• For republished books, be consistent in whether you format as [year] or [first published year]
• Lefranc is dates 1918-19 in References but just 1919 in Footnotes - which is correct?
• Check alphabetization of References, there are a few out of order

I think I've caught and properly rearranged these now. --Alan W (talk) 19:49, 6 February 2011 (UTC)

• " Commentary (Commentary)" - duplication unneeded
• May 2004 missing journal title
• Is Tennessee Law Review published by the University of Tennessee or by the Tennessee Law Review Association?
• Supplement # for Nicoll and Vickers?
• Publisher for Schmucker?
• Don't repeat cited sources in External links. Nikkimaria (talk) 13:22, 4 February 2011 (UTC)

Xover's TODO for References

Making my own little sub-section here to treat as a todo list without messing with Nikkimaria's comment above.

• Chambers 1930 is a multivolume work, so we will need to add volume number to the page numbers in citations; unless we're only citing one of the volumes, in which case we can give the volume once in the References.
  •  Done We only cite Vol. II so I've given that in the references and changed the cites to only give page numbers. I also added Nicholl 2008 (The Lodger: Shakespeare on Silver Street) as an additional—and somewhat more convenient that Chambers 1930—cite for Beaumont's “To B:J”. --Xover (talk) 11:06, 6 February 2011 (UTC)
• Claremont McKenna College 2010 doesn't link because you checked while I was in the middle of a cleanup of the References which changed the assigned author (and thus broke the link from the cite). Will need to be fixed when going over the cites.
  •  Done Fixed. We now cite to The Shakespeare Clinic 2010” as the assigned author. --Xover (talk) 11:16, 6 February 2011 (UTC)
• “Wall Street Journal is a publication not a publisher, and should be italicized Fixed.” Hold yer horses! While The Wall Street Journal is a publication and not a publisher, the cite is to the work WSJ Online for whom the publisher is (the company) The Wall Street Journal. IOW, the formatting is correct (it's provided by the citation template), but one can quibble over the parameter usage of the template (i.e. one might argue that WSJ Online and The Wall Street Journal are one and the same publication).
  • Hmm. Point taken. This is very minor, but of course we should try to figure out which way is correct and fix this correctly if possible. --Alan W (talk) 03:19, 6 February 2011 (UTC)
• Publishing location is now included for all works where such can be determined, and where it makes any kind of sense (i.e. most modern works are published simultaneously all over the world; even including Oxford and Cambridge university presses, otherwise strongly associated with a particular location).
• All web-linked works should now have access dates, unless I missed some.
• All journals should now have publisher information (where it is available).
• Johnuniq has fixed the abbreviated month names in retrieval dates.
• Differing citation templates was due to me being in the middle of a cleanup run. All references should now use the appropriate citation template for the work in question.
• All publishers, journals, and authors etc. are now wikilinked on first occurrence only.
• There are still references not actually cited in the article. Will definitely need to go over that.
  •  Done All done, and I've removed the following references that were not actually cited in the article:
    • Kroeber, Karl (1993). "Shelley's "Defence of Poetry"". In Kroeber, Karl; Ruoff, Gene W. (eds.). Romantic Poetry: Recent Revisionary Criticism. Rutgers University Press. pp. 366–70. ISBN 9780813520100. {{cite book}}: Invalid |ref=harv (help)
    • Law, Marie Hamilton (1965) [First published 1934]. The English familiar essay in the early nineteenth century (Reprint ed.). New York: Russell & Russell. OCLC 490015772. {{cite book}}: Invalid |ref=harv (help)
    • Lee, Sidney (2010) [First published 1898]. A Life of William Shakespeare. Read Books. ISBN 9781444656183. {{cite book}}: Invalid |ref=harv (help)
    • Nelson, Alan H. (1999). "Review: Alias Shakespeare: Solving the Greatest Literary Mystery of All Time by Joseph Sobran". Shakespeare Quarterly. 50 (3). Folger Shakespeare Library: 376–82. doi:10.2307/2902367. ISSN 0037-3222. {{cite journal}}: Invalid |ref=harv (help)
    • Rosenbaum, Ron (18 September 2005). "The Shakespeare Code: Is Times Guy Kind Of Bard 'Creationist'?". The New York Observer. {{cite news}}: Invalid |ref=harv (help)
    • Wells, Stanley (1997). Shakespeare: The Poet & His Plays. Methuen. ISBN 9780413710000. {{cite book}}: Invalid |ref=harv (help)

All republished books (all uses of |origyear) now use “First published year”.

Lefranc 1918–19 is due to ref cleanup without fixing cites. Will fix on runthrough of cites.

•  Done Now citing “Lefranc 1918–19”.

Alphabetization will need to be checked.

•  Done Alan has fixed these. --Xover (talk) 20:56, 6 February 2011 (UTC)

"Commentary (Commentary)"—“Commentary” is both the name of the journal and the name of the publisher, so this use is correct (even if it looks awkward).

May 2004 now has journal name.

The Tennessee Law Review is published by the Tennessee Law Review Association.

The name of the journal is Tennessee Law Review (no “the”). Fixed.

does Kathman really use "antiStratfordism", or is there a space/hyphen missing?

•  Done Kathman 2003 uses “antiStratfordism”, and the rest of the quote verifies as well. --Xover (talk) 20:56, 6 February 2011 (UTC)

I'll try to look at the remaining stuff here tomorrow, and if time allows start a runthrough of the citations. --Xover (talk) 23:56, 5 February 2011 (UTC)

Borrowing this section to add a couple of points:

• The article currently has four red links, each in the References section: journal = Essays in Criticism, journal = Empirical Studies of the Arts, publisher = Baywood Publishing, journal = Literature Compass. Should these be unlinked?
• The text "...performed at Derby's wedding banquet" has citation "Honigmann|1998|pp=150ff.". Ideally the "ff" should be changed to the actual page range (it's the only "ff").

Johnuniq (talk) 08:41, 6 February 2011 (UTC)

I don't have Honigmann 1998 to hand and neither Google nor Amazon are being cooperative. I was able to verify that he starts his discussion on page 150, but I can't tell how far it extends. Anyone else have this work handy to check? --Xover (talk) 09:32, 6 February 2011 (UTC)

The redlinks are deliberate. I went back and forth a bit on this, but ended up redlinking these as they should probably have articles and redlinks are not as such bad. Since we have so few elsewhere, we should, IMO, be able to allow ourselves a few hidden down in the middle of the references. --Xover (talk) 11:08, 6 February 2011 (UTC)

Fine on the redlinks (just checking they were not accidental). Tom fixed the "ff" page range. Johnuniq (talk) 07:28, 7 February 2011 (UTC)

Remaining issues for References

Here, as far as I can see, are the remaining issues brought up by Nikkimaria:

• Extensive use of quotes. We will get flack for these at FAC, so we need to decide whether to keep them and stick to our guns, or nuke `em before FAC.
• Page numbers for things like Baldwin 1944. We're missing page numbers for a bunch of cites (usually very old or very odd stuff), and this needs to be fixed.
• Nikkimaria: «Be consistent in the use of "quoted in" versus "quoting" (and the resulting citation order)» Not checked, but probably needs fixing.
• Nikkimaria: «Another nitpick, but be consistent whether there is or is not a space between the colon and the quotation mark in footnotes where you quote the source»
  •  Done It's more than just consistency: the space should be there; if it's not, that's an error. I could find only one of these, and I fixed it. --Alan W (talk) 05:07, 7 February 2011 (UTC)
• Nikkimaria: «Check for doubled periods caused by citation templates» I'm not quite sure what's intended here. But whatever is meant we need to decide how to deal with it and do so consistently.
  •  Done I knew what she meant. If you are still unclear, just generate the diff, and you'll see. --Alan W (talk) 05:23, 7 February 2011 (UTC)
• Vickers 2006 lacks a supplement number (|issue in the template). I've been unable to find the number since it's not in the summary version (public access) and the archives (which give bib details without a subscription) only go up to 2005. Anyone with TLS subscriber access able to look this up?
  •  Done Tom has fixed this. --Xover (talk) 09:09, 8 February 2011 (UTC)
• Honigmann 1998 needs the proper page number or page range.
  •  Done And before I'd even posted this Tom had added the right page range. :-) --Xover (talk) 21:22, 6 February 2011 (UTC)
• Citation needed tag in article, cf. #Taylor "2002" cite.
  •  Done I cited this to Kathman's article in The Elizabethan Review, but since it was a pain to find the bib info I copped out and cited the copy on the Kathman/Ross web site instead. --Xover (talk) 09:43, 8 February 2011 (UTC)
• The correct publisher to use for Alter 2010 (is WSJ Online strictly the same publication as The Wall Street journal?).

I think that actually covers it for the references. --Xover (talk) 21:11, 6 February 2011 (UTC)

Unfortunately, no. I just found something else, another unfortunate side effect of using this kind of reference template. In cases where a range of pages in a book is given, you get this, e.g.: "In Nolen, Stephanie. Shakespeare's Face: Unraveling the Legend and History of Shakespeare's Mysterious Portrait. Free Press. pp. 103–25." We have to decide whether this should read: "Free Press, pp. 103–25." or else "Free Press. Pp. 103–25." I don't think that the full stop followed by a lowercase letter is acceptable. It certainly looks bad to me. The trouble with this kind of template is that solutions to such problems often have to be kludges, which is what I did to get those "doubled periods" to go away. There are several of these. --Alan W (talk) 05:33, 7 February 2011 (UTC)

I just looked more closely, and, unfortunately, given the nature of the beast, I can't see a way to fix this problem. We enter "pages=103–25", e.g., in the template, and the program that interprets this renders it as "Free Press [or whatever publisher]. pp. 103–25." Of course we don't want to switch to another kind of referencing at this late stage, and so we might just have to live with this. I think it looks bad, but I don't know what we can do about it. --Alan W (talk) 06:14, 7 February 2011 (UTC)

The docs at Template:Cite book have several examples where "Publisher. pp." occurs, and Template talk:Cite book has some discussions regarding the fact that people sometimes have to omit the period after an author's initial to avoid a double period. In both cases, the lowercase "pp" is not mentioned as a problem. I don't think we should worry about it—it's better to follow the standard, even if it produces a less than optimum result (and the lowercase "pp" is ok). Johnuniq (talk) 09:16, 7 February 2011 (UTC)

I agree. Problems with the formatting—unless particularly egregious—caused by citation templates should be fixed in the template rather than worked around in the article. One reason for this is that the templates emit metadata (data that can be interpreted by computers), so that by omitting the full-stop here we're actually feeding incorrect data to it. We should make sure our data is semantically correct and let the templates worry about the formatting. Another reason is that while the formatting may be suboptimal or downright wrong now, once this is fixed in the template it will fix the problem in all articles that use them without manual intervention from editors. If, on the other hand, we put incorrect data into the template to work around this issue, once the template is fixed the formatting will silently and automatically become wrong again at some unpredictable point in the future. This goes for both doubled full-stops and the lower-case “pp”.
We also need to keep in mind that the primary concern here for FAC is consistency. It doesn't really matter what our formatting for citations is so long as it is internally consistent and consistently applied. Nikkimaria's review (as will all other FAC reviewers' be) is deliberately nitpicky—because that's the best way to identify and fix problems, and make the article as good as it can be—but ultimately these kinds of things boil down to what may be termed “reviewer preference” (for lack of a better description). And while we should bend over backwards to address all the concerns raised—because however personal, Nikkimaria's (for example) “reviewer preference” is founded on long experience and much discussion on numerous FACs and articles and represents the best available wisdom of the project on this issue—we do not in fact have to blindly make all changes suggested by the reviewers' comments. Recall that we're now down to arguing about single instances of punctuation here: the issue is material, but not critical, and no FAC will be failed on this basis alone. The FAC reviewers (wolves! wolves, I tell you!) have of necessity quite thick skin: you are allowed to disagree with them (politely and constructively, mind!) and they won't oppose a nomination over a single issue of overall minor importance. Scary and fearsome though they may be, they're still just editors like you and me (hey, that rhymed). --Xover (talk) 10:25, 7 February 2011 (UTC)

I agree that Nikkimaria is quite right to be nitpicky. And while we do not have to follow all of her suggestions (this actually was not one of them, but a problem I found myself), if some formatting looks clearly bad by typical editorial standards, I think we should try to fix it, within reasonable bounds. On the other hand, going too crazy over this, and trying to implement bizarre workarounds, would be, I agree, far more than is desirable now. I thought the observation worth making, but your points are good ones, Xover and Johnuniq, and I agree that unless a standard method of working within the template can be found, it is probably best to leave this alone right now. --Alan W (talk) 03:31, 8 February 2011 (UTC)

I looked more closely at Template:Cite book. There is a way to fine-tune the formatting of these references within the accepted language of the template. The result is still not perfect, but I have been able to change "Publisher. pp." to "Publisher, pp." I think it is an improvement (to me, "Publisher. pp." looks very bad). Naturally, if the consensus is against keeping this change, I will be happy to revert. --Alan W (talk) 04:53, 8 February 2011 (UTC)

Forgot to mention that I found another (minor) problem: "Tudor Aristocrats and the Mythical "Stigma of Print"". Having double quotes within double quotes also looks very bad in my opinion. I have changed this to "Tudor Aristocrats and the Mythical 'Stigma of Print'". There is at least one other instance of the doubling of double quotes that I fixed as well. --Alan W (talk) 05:19, 8 February 2011 (UTC)

Ah, good catch. I corrected all the titles to be identical to the original published sources—there were quite a few arbitrary differences—but didn't go after to see if this lead to any such problems as you here describe. I believe (but would have to check to be sure) that the MoS guidelines here suggest that we alter the quotation marks (ugh. I just checked, and while the preceding is correct, it makes some other rather unsavory suggestions in that section as well). In fact, We may need to check the entire article for quotation mark usage (I know I tend to type typographer's quotes by mistake, and the MoS wants straight quotes). This latter I think is probably a job for John or myself (who both have efficient semi-automated tools for making such changes on an entire article), but we'd probably best try to identify whether there are any edge cases first. --Xover (talk) 09:07, 8 February 2011 (UTC)

(re punctuation in cites) Ah, but you see, this is exactly the sort of thing I warned against above. You've now altered the name of the authors to “Stephanie. Nolen” and “Jonathan. Bate”, and the page number range is now no longer numerical: “103–25.”. That is, you've fixed the current visual presentation of it, but you've made the underlying data incorrect. --Xover (talk) 09:07, 8 February 2011 (UTC)

I'm not saying you were wrong. As I said, even with the changes, the entries are far from perfect. And in the case of those entries you have pointed out, I will now, taking full responsibility for my experiment, go back in and see if I can fix those problems. "Jonathan. Bate" bothers me as much as it does you, you can be sure. Probably something can be done about that. We certainly do not want the data to be incorrect. I agree 100%. --Alan W (talk) 03:51, 9 February 2011 (UTC)

You have me puzzled, Xover. I cannot find any "Stephanie. Nolen" or "Jonathan. Bate" in the References as viewed on the article page. Of course they might appear odd within the templates as viewed on the Editing page. But it's supposed to be like that. What I did was perfectly legitimate. The template allows for the use of a "separator" keyword with an empty value to signify to the interpreting program that punctuation for this entry will be entered manually. That is what the "separator" keyword exists for, to override the default separator punctuation. It's just another, and probably little-used, but still not incorrect, use of the template language. This does not make the underlying data incorrect at all. The "data" is "Bate" and "Jonathan". The period/full stop on the page as viewed is not conceptually part of the original data any more than it was when done the original way. No more are the literal "[[" part of the data, they are just part of the formatting to create Wikilinks. The template necessarily includes internal formatting devices, and I have just opted to enter some of them manually in the instances I've changed. If we must have only the most literal data in the template entries, then we shouldn't have "[[Cambridge University Press]]" either. After all, the square brackets are not part of the name of the publisher.

Having said all that, I will add that if the consensus here turns out to be that the way the References looked originally is still preferable, there is still plenty of time to revert before FAR. And I will take the trouble to do it carefully myself, if that is really what is preferred. --Alan W (talk) 04:31, 9 February 2011 (UTC)

I believe that Xover is making the point that in the wikitext is a citation which includes "editor-first = Stephanie." (with the period as part of the first name of an editor). People do not see that period as data (it displays as text in the article), but if the citations were extracted by some hypothetical system for use elsewhere, the data extracted would include punctuation. Furthermore, if someone decides to "fix" the citation template, the workarounds of including punctuation in the data would persist and may cause problems with the fixed template. I am unaware of any such hypothetical system, but I am sympathetic to Xover's argument: it is not really our problem if the standard template produces some punctuation which is suboptimal; including workarounds like this makes the citations a little clumsy and fragile (future editors will wonder why some names end with a period, and someone will "fix" it by removing the period, or by adding periods to all the names). Johnuniq (talk) 06:26, 9 February 2011 (UTC)

Despite what I've said above, I am in a sense also "on the fence", Johnuniq. This is not a perfect solution, but is there really one? I do see the point. Ideally, we would not have to have the period actually present in that field in the template. But I will also note the fixing of another thing Nikkimaria pointed to: "Check for doubled periods caused by citation templates". This also necessitated monkeying around with the raw "data" in the templates to avoid something like "Smith, John.." appearing in the References. Unfortunately, these computer programs are far from perfect, and sometimes compromises are necessary. We have already had to make some compromises. I believe it is most important to conform to generally accepted bibliographical practices. I also firmly believe that the programs used in rendering these Wikipedia pages, like all computer programs, are tools for practical use, often imperfect ones, and we shouldn't let ourselves be enslaved by them. We need to maintain some perspective. We don't want this to become a case of, "If all you have is a hammer, every problem looks like a nail". --Alan W (talk) 06:49, 9 February 2011 (UTC)

You make good points, and I might now be leaning in your direction. It's certainly true that the cleanups you have performed have added up to a major improvement. Let's see if there are other thoughts. Johnuniq (talk) 07:01, 9 February 2011 (UTC)

Oh, Alan, no; I did not mean to imply that you'd done something “wrong” (and my apologies if I expressed myself poorly!). If this was a question with only two answers (“right” and “wrong” ways to do it) we wouldn't be debating the best way, we'd just be doing it the right way. All your points above are valid (and thus “right”), and as John says they are persuasive; and we may end up weighing those points most heavily.
However, and please forgive me for going into interminable technical detail here, there are a separate set of concerns that also bear on this issue. The “article” that you see in your web browser exists—technically—in several different stages or levels. There is the WikiCode that you edit (possibly via the WYSIWYG rich-text editor) that is mostly just text, but which also has some minimal markup code that describes the text (i.e. “This is a link. This here is a heading. etc.”). A part of this WikiCode is the template system; and templates are pre-processed using a macro processor that emits WikiCode. For instance, some of the parameters in the template are emitted with '' surrounding them so that it is eventually displayed as italic text. This WikiCode is what is stored in the Wikipedia database. When you request a page on Wikipedia this WikiCode is processed by the Mediawiki software and emitted to your web browser as HTML code (like any other web page), which your web browser interprets and displays to you with all the normal formatting, active links, etc. So… What you've done is “fool” this chain of events so that in that final step—the display to the user in the web browser—the citations look right. In other words, you've employed some technical trickery that makes the final appearance of the data correct. However, and this is the crucial part, in the transformation from WikiCode to HTML there is more happening than meets the eye (literally). In addition to producing the HTML code that your browser renders as italic titles and boldface volume numbers etc., the WikiCode processor also generates what is known as COinS metadata. This is data structured in a way that makes it possible for an automated system (i.e. a computer) to interpret it, but that is invisible for users in a normal web browser. The data is possible to extract using software such as Reference Manager, Zotero, or citeulike.org; and enables such things as JSTOR's “Most cited” lists only for Wikipedia. There is a similar thing going on with “Persondata” (for biographical articles, the name date of birth, date of death, etc. are embedded in the article as invisible metadata) and there is an extension you can turn on in Wikipedia that will display this data to you in articles that have it (the display looks vaguely like a typical infobox). The pervasive existence of such data is the only way short of Strong AI that we can achieve intelligent tools for querying, extracting, and processing data on the web. The distinction is one of “Say what it is” rather than “Say what it looks like”: if you tell a computer that “This text is italic” it's still no wiser, even if a human being can infer from context and prior experience that it's probably a journal title; if you tell it “This is a journal title, that's the author's last name, that's his first name” then it can decide dynamically how to display it as well as let you search for books authored by Chambers distinctly from a journal with Chambers in its title. Or narrow a search to only apply to hits between two specific dates. Or other such semantic features that we would expect from, say, JSTOR or arXiv, but which are not currently (yet) available on Wikipedia.
Anyways, the relevance of the above to the current issue is this: by jigging the template such that the citation looks right in the browser, the metadata has become incorrect. The name is now not “Jonathan” but “Jonathan.” (as far as a computer is concerned), and a computer can't distinguish between the period in that and the period in, say, “E. R. C.” (i.e. Brinkworth) or “T. W.” (i.e. Baldwin). It can guess, but computers are notoriously bad guessers (humans, on the other hand, are exceptionally good guessers). The reason I brought up whether we need to implement every suggestion made by the FAC reviewers is this: if we explain to them that the problem of initial capitals or doubled periods are caused by limitations of the citation template, they will accept that and won't hold up the FAC over such a minor issue (and they've likely also seen this kind of issue before). Thus we can have correct metadata without jeopardizing the FAC, at the cost of some—strictly speaking minor—niggles with the display of the citation in the article. Hence the issue then becomes: do we think this display issue outweighs the other concerns that are caused by the workarounds. And here is the point on which reasonable men may (and do) disagree. --Xover (talk) 09:50, 9 February 2011 (UTC)

Thanks, Xover (and no offense taken or anything like that; I think of this as a friendly debate), for pointing out the connection of Wikipedia bibliographical material to various projects to extract searchable data from these pages, and to COinS metadata, of which I was not aware. In my current employment, I work with computer technology every day, and one thing I know is how little I know. So I am always glad to learn more. I am certainly quite aware, probably more than most, of the difference between "Jonathan" and "Jonathan." to a computer program that parses such data, and have written such programs myself (not, to be sure, at the advanced level required for such projects as those you mention; I'm saying this so you're aware that I'm not entirely ignorant of such things). And therein lies a dilemma, and I'm torn between the two sides and as much "on the fence" as Johnuniq. I also have strong background in editorial work, as well as cataloguing of reference materials. And it really goes against the grain with me to see such things as "Jones, Susan M.." and "Harcourt Brace Jovanovich. pp. 75–9." There is no easy solution to this problem. One problem is most likely that the programmers of the code that parses these templates are not aware of all the uses to which it is being put, or they would have found ways around these problems, and punctuation would be correct while metadata is being preserved for the search engines. But this code has probably not yet advanced to that point, so we have to take what we can get.

Whatever is decided—and I certainly welcome more opinions on this matter—I would remind everyone that if we do opt for clean preservation of the metadata, that means that we will have to revert to templates that display many entries as "Jones, Susan M.." as well as "Harcourt Brace Jovanovich. pp. 75–9." There is no point in keeping "Harcourt Brace Jovanovich" clean while having "Jones, Susan M" along with, elsewhere, "Johnson, Charles P.". I think that consistency is important—either consistency among entries as viewed, or consistency in keeping the metadata clean. I could go on about this, as it has engaged skills I've acquired through many issues of this kind wrestled with in as many as three of my numerous careers. But this is quite enough for now. :-) --Alan W (talk) 04:43, 10 February 2011 (UTC)

I'm on the side that looks the best for readers. I'm sure that somewhere along the line a program will be written that solves all these problems for machine readers and people readers simultaneously, but until then I think our primary concern should be for those who turn to Wikipedia for information about a topic rather than for indexing information. Just my 2p. Tom Reedy (talk) 17:08, 10 February 2011 (UTC)

Publisher of WSJ Online

(Breaking this out into its own section.) How to deal with the publisher of Alter 2010 is an interesting question, albeit far from our most important issue. I have a couple of further thoughts on this. First, I cannot find any good examples in Wikipedia showing exactly the kind of reference we have here for an online publication. However, WP:Citing_sources#Webpages does not stipulate the need for a publisher at all for a web page. If we do include the publisher, who in fact is the publisher? In a loose sense we could say it's The Wall Street Journal. But, really, that publication is published by Dow-Jones and Company, Inc. Another observation is that WSJ Online, on the page with the Alter article, identifies itself as WSJ.com. Probably, however, that article did appear in the printed Wall Street Journal for April 9, 2010 (and the page also identifies itself as The Wall Street Journal), so there is some connection. What about leaving out the publisher as publisher but identifying the publication as The Wall Street Journal (WSJ Online)? That way we will avoid having readers wonder, What the heck is WSJ? The Wall Street Journal has instant recognizability. And yet we will also be clarifying that this reference was retrieved from the Web version on the retrieval date given. --Alan W (talk) 22:01, 6 February 2011 (UTC)

While the guideline may not explicitly require a publisher for a web page, I can tell you from experience that FAC does require it - minimum at FAC for webpages is URL, title, publisher and retrieval date. FWIW. Nikkimaria (talk) 23:17, 8 February 2011 (UTC)

Thanks for the feeback on this, Nikkimaria. But what I am wondering is, who the heck is the publisher? Really, as I said, it's Dow-Jones. But would it make more sense to give The Wall Street Journal? If this is required for FAs, then can you point to some precedent, so we can see what the general practice is in cases like this? --Alan W (talk) 03:54, 9 February 2011 (UTC)

On the current FAC page, the most relevant thing I see is "Site publisher names should be given rather than website names", but not much beyond that. I'll look around for a similar case to the one here. Nikkimaria (talk) 04:14, 9 February 2011 (UTC)

Thanks, I'd be interested to see what you find. This might be relatively uncharted territory. Maybe we'll be breaking new ground and set a precedent ourselves. Wikipedia might be ten years old, but that doesn't mean that all the best ways of doing things have yet been thoroughly worked out. --Alan W (talk) 04:40, 9 February 2011 (UTC)

Whoops. I added the publisher before reading this. I'll leave it there until somebody decides what's right. Personally as long as there's something there that's not wrong I'm all right with it. Dow Jones & Company is the WSJ pub, and WSJ puts their content online, so it's not wrong. Tom Reedy (talk) 04:42, 9 February 2011 (UTC)

Are we sure Dow is the publisher? It is the owner, certainly, but that's not necessarily the same as the publisher. It is common for newspapers to be published by a separate legal entity of the same name as the publication (i.e. the paper The Wall Street Journal is published by a legal entity named “The Wall Street Journal”, or the journal Commentary that is published by a legal entity named “Commentary”). In this instance I suspect the legal entity named “The Wall Street Journal” publishes the printed-on-dead-trees newspaper The Wall Street Journal as well as the electronic-news-site WSJ Online. WSJ Online is definitely not the same as The Wall Street Journal (the content and editorial policies are different). My conclusion is that in this case, the work is “WSJ Online” and the publisher is The Wall Street Journal. You may, of course, disagree. :-) --Xover (talk) 09:05, 9 February 2011 (UTC)

I believe you're making a distinction without a difference. No one reading the cite would be confused about this. On all the books we've cited from Google Books, should we add Google as the publisher? My guess is no. Tom Reedy (talk) 13:27, 9 February 2011 (UTC)

I'll freely admit we're now into staggering levels of nitpickery here, but in your example Google is clearly not the publisher of the work any more than JSTOR is the publisher for any of the articles found there. The work has a set of editorial policies etc.—which are often more lax and geared towards quick updates on the online editions of well known papers—and it has a publisher which takes responsibility of the published work (and is who takes the summons when somebody sues the paper). But in this specific instance I just now discover that you're actually entirely correct: when I finally got around to checking up it turns out Dow Jones is the publisher in the sense I refer to above (I had them pegged only as an investment / financial analyst firm, but they actually started as a publisher). That leaves only whether to cite it as WSJ Online or The Wall Street Journal, which, while I prefer the former, is a bit too esoteric for even me to have strong opinions on. :-) --Xover (talk) 18:31, 9 February 2011 (UTC)

Well when we cite TLS or NYTimes with a link we don't call them anything other than Times Literary Supplement and New York Times, so I vote for Wall Street Journal. Tom Reedy (talk) 20:24, 9 February 2011 (UTC)

It is staggeringly simple to wikilink the publication, either as The Wall Street Journal or as |work=The Wall Street Journal. One can add |edition=WSJOnline for further clarity. If an occasional reader wants to know the publisher, editor, circulation, and other details, it is then just a click away. LeadSongDog come howl! 19:16, 16 February 2011 (UTC)

References and periods again

I know I didn't follow all the discussion about this earlier, but why do some authors have periods after their names and others have the periods after the date? Examples:

Londré, Felicia Hardison. (1997)

Churchill, Reginald Charles (1958).

Tom Reedy (talk) 06:21, 13 February 2011 (UTC)

Alas, this is another unwanted side effect of using this kind of template, along with fixing other kinds of problems in some instances. If we want consistency here, we might have to give up trying to fix those other problems and settle for "Publisher. pp. 256–7" and that kind of thing. As I said, even with my fixes, the solution is not perfect, and you have just found one of the imperfections. This is one reason why I prefer other styles of listing references. Not that I think we should change to a different style at this late stage, but, well, just mentioning it. I'm thinking now that I might be able to figure out another way of handling cases where page ranges are mentioned; but I wouldn't be surprised if that causes some other problem. Getting late here, but I can look into it tomorrow. --Alan W (talk) 06:39, 13 February 2011 (UTC)

The choice and use of citation templates is a daunting subject. Here I will be thinking out loud as I try to learn more about this and consider how we can use this knowledge to our advantage. The following should not be considered as any kind of final, formal proposal.

The major problems I've seen in reference formatting come with references to chapters of books. Ideally, I would like to see (to take Bate 2002 as an example) something that looks like this (following the example in WP:Citing_sources/example_style#Books):

• Bate, Jonathan (2002). "Scenes from the Birth of a Myth". In Stephanie Nolen (Ed.), Shakespeare's Face: Unraveling the Legend and History of Shakespeare's Mysterious Portrait, pp. 103–25. Free Press. ISBN 9780743249324

But this older form of referencing lacks some advantages that come from using templates. I see that we are using the Harvard style. The way Bate 2002 originally looked with that kind of template was:

• Bate, Jonathan (2002). "Scenes from the Birth of a Myth". In Nolen, Stephanie (ed.). Shakespeare's Face: Unraveling the Legend and History of Shakespeare's Mysterious Portrait. Free Press. pp. 103–25. ISBN 9780743249324. {{cite book}}: External link in |chapterurl= (help); Invalid |ref=harv (help); Unknown parameter |chapterurl= ignored (|chapter-url= suggested) (help)

This is where the "Free Press. pp. 103–25." problem comes in. In order to eliminate it, I attempted to use the option whereby one may control punctuation between elements:

• Bate, Jonathan. (2002). "Scenes from the Birth of a Myth.". In Nolen, Stephanie. (ed.). Shakespeare's Face: Unraveling the Legend and History of Shakespeare's Mysterious Portrait. Free Press,. pp. 103–25. ISBN 9780743249324. {{cite book}}: Cite has empty unknown parameter: |separator= (help); External link in |chapterurl= (help); Invalid |ref=harv (help); Unknown parameter |chapterurl= ignored (|chapter-url= suggested) (help)CS1 maint: extra punctuation (link)

Even though we now have the more desirable "Free Press, pp. 103–25." this method, as Tom has observed, creates a new problem: it moves the full stops to unwanted places, inconsistent with the formatting in other references.

Another thing I haven't yet mentioned is that I do not like the way this template organizes its elements, in particular that it appends page numbers to the publisher. I would much prefer that page numbers follow the title of the book, as in the manually formatted first example above. It certainly seems more logical that way, as well as following traditional bibliographical practice.

I tried another trick with the template, to try to force the coupling of title and page numbers, and this was the result:

• Bate, Jonathan (2002). "Scenes from the Birth of a Myth". In Nolen, Stephanie (ed.). Shakespeare's Face: Unraveling the Legend and History of Shakespeare's Mysterious Portrait, pp. 103–25. Free Press. ISBN 9780743249324. {{cite book}}: External link in |chapterurl= (help); Invalid |ref=harv (help); Unknown parameter |chapterurl= ignored (|chapter-url= suggested) (help)

Clearly not right at all: now "pp. 103–25" appears in italics! On the assumption that long ago this article advanced past the point of no return with the Harvard template (and I'll grant the advantage it gives in linking from footnote to reference), I would suggest that now we are faced with choosing either the strictest observance of the template format, which would give us "Publisher. pp. 35–8."; or the occasional modification that would give us "Publisher, pp. 35–8." but also "Bate, Jonathan. (2002)" instead of the more consistent "Bate, Jonathan (2002)."

That's as far as I've thought the matter through right now. Any comments, of course, are welcome. --Alan W (talk) 03:08, 14 February 2011 (UTC)

Are there any source templates that are problem-free? Or are the problems just different? Also it doesn't appear that the William Shakespeare article has those problems, in spite if its use of harvard nb template. It uses a loc= field for a lot of the data. Tom Reedy (talk) 04:05, 14 February 2011 (UTC)

Tom, whatever problems with the references on the Shakespeare page, they do not include the one we have been focusing on, involving page sequences for portions of books, simply because somewhere along the line the community of editors decided not to give page sequences for books. See, for example, Bryant (1998). It's easy enough to avoid a problem if you avoid doing the thing that triggers the problem. Obviously, however, a certain flexibility is lost. --Alan W (talk) 05:41, 14 February 2011 (UTC)

Are we looking at the same article? Cos the one I'm looking at has many refs with page sequences of books, beginning with Bevington and ending with Bloom. One other thing I noticed is that their reference entries don't end with "ref=harv", in addition to their cites using "loc=3" instead of "p=3". Tom Reedy (talk) 12:55, 14 February 2011 (UTC)

While we would have to be nuts to consider changing from harvnb at this stage, I am happy to look at whether such a change could be semi automated so required changes would at least be reliably made. Accordingly, if anyone has a suggestion for a better citation system, let them speak now...

Charles Darwin is one featured article I am aware of that uses harvnb, and it has the "Publisher. pp." problem (period following publisher's name, then lowercase "pp"). I do not think there were any other problems?

Assuming there is not some problem-free citation system available, I am thinking we should go back to "vanilla" citations (and accept a period before "pp"). For one thing, my earlier comment about fragility applies because I was looking through the wikitext of the references section of the SAQ and Darwin articles, and I saw some titles in the Darwin article which mistakenly have a period at the end (it gives a double period in the article). Then I noticed some titles in SAQ which also finish with a period, and I was thinking I would have to delete them when I realized they were part of the customizations. We need to make a decision on this soon. Johnuniq (talk) 07:11, 14 February 2011 (UTC)

I agree the refs need to be formatted properly according to the style and accepting whatever problems go along with it rather than introducing new ones. Once that is done, I suggest doing a mass find/replace with "loc=(page numbers)" replacing "p=(pages number)" and "pp=(page numbers) in each cite and deleting the ultimate "ref-harv" from each reference entry and seeing what happens. As I pointed out above, the William Shakespeare article does not have any problems of the nature this article is experiencing. Tom Reedy (talk) 13:01, 14 February 2011 (UTC)

I'm to blame! I adopted it in my draft because it worked snazzily on several articles I wrote, after a suggestion by the Nabster there. One would think, after all these years, that wiki had some policy on this (I don't read policy pages), re optimal citational format, with a ready-to-copy and paste standard template. In any case, I agree with Tom's larger vision that this article was to clean up a messy corner of the Shakespeare articles, resolve the chronic seepage of POV from this area into the broader field of Shakespeare articles, and, as a natural corollary, one would think that, now this issue has been settled, we should aim for an informal agreement to use, from here on in, any standard template that generates the fewest problems, and the Shakespeare article seems, for the moment, to fit the bill. Field consistency should be an ideal we all underwrite. Nishidani (talk) 16:06, 14 February 2011 (UTC)

The |loc and |ref=harv bits are red herrings; the material difference is that William Shakespeare uses the generic {{Citation}} template (that Tom/Nish originally used) rather than the specific {{Cite book}} and {{Cite journal}} etc. templates (that I added while working on the refs) in use on this article. The reason it appears to not have the same formatting issues is because it is a “dumb” (generic) template: it doesn't know what kind of work it's citing, and so it can't apply work-specific formatting, opting instead to just tack on commas between each parameter (this is an over-simplification, but covers the gist). If we decide this is preferable to the original issues Alan noticed then switching this article to use that template is a fairly trivial mechanical transformation (either I or John can do that easily).
However, I will take the opportunity to restate my opinion that we should just live with the (original) minor formatting issues and stop trying to find workarounds in this article when the issues are better addressed centrally in the template to the benefit of all articles that use it. While I sympathize with Alan's being irked by the unconventional use of capitalization and punctuation in the current output (I'm the same way with these things), the issue is a marginal one; is not critical for FAC; and is better addressed elsewhere. --Xover (talk) 21:22, 14 February 2011 (UTC)

1. What is the advantage of using the specific template over the generic?

2. Is any effort being made to address the issues in the specific template that you know of?

3. If it's a relatively simple matter to convert to the problem-free template, wouldn't it be just as simple to convert back when and if the problems are solved, assuming there are benefits to doing so? Tom Reedy (talk) 22:41, 14 February 2011 (UTC)

Whoa! Tom, all—a little misunderstanding about six paragraphs up has snowballed into a sweeping plan to make mass substitutions and possibly change citation templates. Tom, you asked if we were looking at the same article. Well, yes; but we were not looking at the same part of the article. What we call "References", the Shakespeare article calls "Bibliography". And what we call "Footnotes" the Shakespeare article calls "References" (breaking out more substantive footnotes into another section called "Notes", which is another legitimate way of doing things). I am talking about their "Bibliography", which corresponds to our "References". And their Bibliography does not include page numbers for portions of books; ours does. Please look again.

I think that Xover is right about not giving up the Harvard template so fast. The generic template in my opinion (again, agreeing with Xover) is even less satisfactory in its blanket use of comma separators, in ways that don't make sense (e.g., "in deGrazia, Margreta; Wells, Stanley, The Cambridge Companion to Shakespeare,"; if a semicolon separates the coauthors, I would think we need a stronger separator than a comma to separate the second author from the title).

We may do well to live with "Publisher. pp." Though it goes against the grain with me, it does seem like the best compromise right now. As I've said, I much prefer conforming to standard bibliographical formatting and punctuation; but that would require formatting manually, using no template at all. Though also acceptable (and I've seen FAs that do this), I have to agree with what I gather is the consensus that we are too far along and have invested too much in these templates to give them up at this late stage.

I'll remind us, though, that if we want to use the Harvard template in the most proper way, we will also have to live with a few doubled periods, such as pointed out by Nikkimaria. (E.g., "In White, Paul W.; Westfall, Suzanne R.. Shakespeare and Theatrical Patronage in Early Modern England.)

Finally, If anyone still wants to experiment with different templates or usage of templates, I suggest posting a few examples here, as I did above, rather than immediately performing a programmatic mass find-and-replace operation. --Alan W (talk) 03:55, 15 February 2011 (UTC)

I favor using {{Cite book}} as it is the "correct" template for books and its problems should be fixed at the template, and while the glitches are irritating, they have minimal impact on the article text (I think the problem is "Publisher. pp" and some doubled periods, and those problems do not occur in the body of the article?). For interest, I will mention that while hunting around for info, I found this discussion where a couple of people strongly express the view that they (and articles) are better off without citation templates. Johnuniq (talk) 04:31, 15 February 2011 (UTC)

Those editors in that discussion you refer to make a lot of good points; look how much time is consumed on something as trivial as the citation apparatus, both there and here. To be perfectly honest, I prefer merely "Author, title of work, title of book or journal if needed, year, and page numbers". With those four or five bits of data anybody can find any source in the world. I think a lot of information is being added simply because it can be, not because it needs to be, and I believe Wikipedia prefers the more data-dense method in an attempt to overcome its inferiority complex. Oddly enough, Oxford publications require only those bits of data I outlined above for sourcing.

Having said that, I realise that the citation apparatus for this article is not going to change to suit me, nor would I want it to at this late stage, but I would prefer a style that favours the reader over the format. To me, neutral, verifiable content is more important than how its cited or how that cite looks to a machine reader. Tom Reedy (talk) 04:53, 15 February 2011 (UTC)

So I guess what I'm saying is that I'll go along with whatever you guys decide! Tom Reedy (talk) 04:58, 15 February 2011 (UTC)

Johnuniq, thanks for the heads-up about that discussion on the Citing sources/example style talk page. Very relevant, and it seems to be very much a current discussion. I have now posted my own comments there, describing the issues we are debating here. That way others will be made aware of some problems that can occur with specific needs when using the {{Cite book}} template for a bibliography in an article on a literary topic. I can fully understand why some would now be arguing against use of templates. I've already stated my objections, so I won't repeat them, but I'll add that I agree that we should stick with this template now that we have invested so much time and energy in it. No, it won't have any effect on the article itself that I am aware of. And, as Xover says, it shouldn't be an impediment to, and might even help getting to, FA status. One beauty of Wikipedia is that nothing is carved in stone. Perhaps at a later time, some solution to our bibliographical problems will be found. --Alan W (talk) 04:19, 16 February 2011 (UTC)

I read your comment and am now watching the page, although it looks to be a difficult problem with no trouble-free solution.

What will we do in this article? We have to finalize this very soon.

If there is currently a problem in the article body that would be solved by returning to vanilla citations (i.e. remove "separator" and the other tweaks performed by Alan), I think that would be best. Final opinions please!

@Alan: Are you saying we should restore vanilla citations (if so, do you want to do that?), or do you want to stay with the current customizations? Johnuniq (talk) 06:40, 16 February 2011 (UTC)

We might want to restore vanilla citations within the {{Cite book}} template, but we don't have to do this immediately. I got a response on that template talk page, and that user has posted something on the page where the template programmers will see it. It is possible that someone will be able to give us the appearance we want, even with the plain-vanilla citations, and then of course we should restore those. I should be able to do that easily enough, since I have kept an offline record of the changes I made. If you think that, regardless, we should revert to vanilla now, please say the word and I will do so at my earliest convenience. I'll say that I agree with you that this problem does not look easy to solve. CharlesGillingham might be a bit too cheerfully optimistic about this. --Alan W (talk) 00:38, 17 February 2011 (UTC)

OK, I am watching the discussion with interest, but I am similarly skeptical about a fix coming any time soon (mainly because of the possibility of messing up lots of articles by even the simplest change to the template). By all means let's wait for a day or even two, but we should aim to achieve article stability very soon. My understanding is that it would be highly desirable for there to be only minor editing for a significant period before presenting the article for FAC, and I think it would be useful to finish known issues ASAP, and I'm hoping you will restore the vanilla citations soon, assuming nothing turns up re cite book. Johnuniq (talk) 10:04, 17 February 2011 (UTC)

That sounds reasonable. I just answered another posting on that talk page, and it looks like the debate could go on a long time before anyone even makes an attempt to change the parsing and display of the template. Also, I'm thinking now that those working on templates are probably not familiar with standard punctuation in literary biographies. These templates are a "one size fits all" approach, which doesn't entirely work, as different fields of study have different requirements and traditional practices. I hope to be able to clean up the templates ("clean up" from a purist perspective, where we should not have any punctuation in the template fields unless the punctuation is actually part of someone's, or some work's, name) at the latest over the weekend, and I may be able to get to it sooner than that. --Alan W (talk) 03:22, 18 February 2011 (UTC)

Well, I ended up doing this now, after all. When I looked through the records I kept, and checked a diff or two as well, it didn't seem as daunting a task as I had expected. I don't think I missed anything. If I did, one of us will catch it. Now I can focus on other things, including reading through the article at least one final time. --Alan W (talk) 04:05, 18 February 2011 (UTC)

Thanks, that's great. It looks like some generic conversations are going to occur, without much progress. Perhaps later if you feel like it we could examine the issue some more (currently I have only looked at it superficially). We could even consider making our own "Cite book2" template at least as a trial to see what is involved (then we could fiddle without worrying about breaking other articles). That would be a month or two after FA! Meanwhile, a last read through would be helpful (but the image problem discussed elsewhere on this page remains). Johnuniq (talk) 06:59, 18 February 2011 (UTC)

That is a good idea, about making our own "Cite book2" template. Maybe Xover, who seems to know a lot about that kind of thing, could provide some input as well. And I see from your user page that you're like a fish in water in this area. Despite all the computer- and programming-related matters I deal with in my current day job, I have not hitherto involved myself in this aspect of Wikipedia at all, but I would certainly be willing to do this in such a good cause. Yes, of course, as you say, first FA for SAQ; then we can see what we want to do about the template issue. Once we make FA (I'm being optimistic), there is no Wiki rule prohibiting anyone from improving articles still further. --Alan W (talk) 11:06, 19 February 2011 (UTC)

This looks like a well done article (congratulations to you all). I am curious about your citation issues (and somewhat overwhelmed by all the discussion here), and wonder if someone could summarize why use of the {{citation}} template was not deemed suitable. - J. Johnson (JJ) (talk) 20:40, 24 February 2011 (UTC)

Hyphens in ISBNs

We decided to remove all hyphens from ISBNs because some FAC reviewers had found inconsistencies in appearance. I just noticed something which I am recording here for consideration. This edit at Charles Darwin was by User:RjwilmsiBot and it inserted hyphens into each ISBN. The bot approval page is here, and one day the bot will notice this page and insert hyphens into each ISBN (checking the bot's contribs shows it is doing lots of articles). Johnuniq (talk) 04:12, 15 February 2011 (UTC)

JHFC! What kind of reviewers make a big deal out of ISBN appearances? Have they forgotten the main purpose of an encyclopedia? Tom Reedy (talk) 04:24, 15 February 2011 (UTC)

Easy, Tom. No reviewer (well, none that I know of, at least) would make a big deal of ISBN appearance - if anything, it'll be a single bullet point on a list like the one I made on reference formatting (and I didn't even notice the hyphenation). Deal with the larger-scale issues, and if you take this article to FAC and somebody complains about ISBN hyphenation I volunteer to personally fix it. Nikkimaria (talk) 04:41, 16 February 2011 (UTC)

It's easy enough to get consistency by always inserting the hyphens, and putting them in the right place – even a bot can do it – and it's easier on the eye than 13 consecutive digits. What was the reviewer's issue? Kanguole 18:28, 19 February 2011 (UTC)

I do not know, and am happy either way, although my inclination is to follow whatever Xover says! On the other hand, the bot is inserting dashes at the rate of about five articles per minute, and ISBNs are generally shown with hyphens, so I could also be persuaded to insert them. I believe the only discussion here is in archive 21 where Xover said "As an example, in one of our FACs, the reviewers seized on inconsistent placement of dashes within ISBN numbers (which will always be inconsistent as ISBNs are of different lengths and conventions among publishers vary), so the only way to make them completely consistent is to remove the dashes entirely." Johnuniq (talk) 03:01, 21 February 2011 (UTC)

I suggest we do not cater to the ignorance of one reviewer. Tom Reedy (talk) 03:15, 21 February 2011 (UTC)

Tom, I suggest you avoid referring to as ignorance those concerns of which you are ignorant (if I can torture the grammar so far to make the point). As Nikkimaria says, it was one bullet point among several comments in a review years ago, and the thrust of it was that they need to be consistently formatted within the article. If you look at the bot approval discussion linked above (and WP:ISBN) you'll see that the underlying issue is deceptively complex (Kanguole: the bot does it by looking up dash placement on WorldCat's API; it may be computationally simple in the strict sense, but not in the sense you imply above). However, the issue for this article is quite simple: if we leave off the hyphens in ISBNs we'll be consistent, and won't have to deal with that at FAC, and if the bot should come by later and insert dashes then great, we'll have correctly placed dashes with zero manual labor. Let's not blow this issue out of proportion. --Xover (talk) 10:01, 21 February 2011 (UTC)

I didn't mean to imply it was trivial. I know it involves a table lookup, because I put in the non-zero manual labour that added most of those dashes (and wish it hadn't been undone). Anyway, my point was that removing them was not the only way to achieve consistency. But I suppose that time and the bot will fix all. Kanguole 15:43, 21 February 2011 (UTC)

Oh crap. Does this mean you'd already done the job of looking up and inserting dashes in the correct places before I went over and removed them all? If that's the case then I just plain screwed up; I was so sure they were inconsistent and it didn't even occur to me that someone might have done that (it's certainly more manual labur than I would have volunteered to do). Mea maxima culpa! --Xover (talk) 16:12, 21 February 2011 (UTC)

Not to worry. I hope you won't mind if I put them back – let's pretend the bot got here already. I'd be happy to do any that are added later (it's pretty easy, really). Kanguole 21:50, 21 February 2011 (UTC)

For what it's worth, I just did a spot check, and, as far as I can see, the hyphens have been placed correctly, according to the rules on ISBN. Thank you, Kanguole! Xover, I wouldn't flagellate myself over this. It may have been very easy for Kanguole to restore the hyphenation. To paraphrase a popular quip, on the Internet, nobody knows you're a bot. :-) --Alan W (talk) 00:17, 22 February 2011 (UTC)

Christopher Marlowe 2

Recent edits in the Christopher Marlowe section need consideration.

This text:

The Marlovian theory asserts that his death on 30 May 1593 was faked, and that this deception allowed him to become the ghost writer of the Shakespeare canon.

was changed to

The Marlovian theory is based on the argument that his documented death on 30 May 1593 was most probably a fake, and that this deception necessarily resulted in his becoming the ghost writer of the Shakespeare canon.

This paragraph was added:

However, the various reasons offered by Marlovians since 1955 for believing that this is indeed what happened have been almost entirely ignored by their opponents who have simply stated, for example, that the suggestion that Marlowe's death was faked is "no trail at all", or that the claims for "Bacon and Oxford can be taken as representative" so that it is found unnecessary to deal with the case in detail.

Re "death": As a minimum, the wording needs simplification and clarification: "was probably faked" might do. The deception did not result in ghost writing—a faked death would require that any authorship be as a ghost writer, but it would be safer and simpler to not write at all, so authorship was not a "result".

Of course you are right, in trying to indicate that the only way in which he would have been able to continue writing would have had to be pseudonymously, I succeeded only in producing rubbish. Thanks! How about "The Marlovian theory is based on the argument that his documented death on 30 May 1593 was probably faked, and that Shakespeare was chosen as the necessary 'front' behind whom he would be able to continue his highly successful playwriting."

Re "ignored by their opponents": This para needs reworking as it makes an unverifiable claim (that opponents have ignored various reasons), and it uses cherry-picked items to suggest that objections to Marlowe's authorship are inconsequential. To use this text, we would need a reliable source stating that scholars have made no other objections. Johnuniq (talk) 07:43, 16 February 2011 (UTC)

Yes, I agree, I was going to comment on this section. The last para is not acceptable I think. What also puzzled me is the reference (twice) to 1955. What great event took place in 1955?! OK, I see the answer is there if you search the rest of the article, but it reads rather oddly as it is now. Poujeaux (talk) 09:21, 16 February 2011 (UTC)

This is so frustrating. Those of us (including Tom and Nishidani) who have been scouring the records desperately trying to find salient comments by 'reliable sources' on anything other than Hoffman's book of over half a century ago know very well that this is true, but we aren't allowed to say so. The expression 'cherry-picking' implies that I have deliberately chosen these examples from among an abundant crop of other possibilities. Please tell us who you have in mind as it will make our job so much easier! I think that this is a very relevant piece of information, given the constraints under which we are working, but it's catch-22 isn't it?. We can't refer to the lack of reliably sourced comments because of the lack of reliably sourced comments.

An illustration. My own essay Marlowe's Sudden and Fearful End explains in excruciating detail why I claim that the most logical explanation for what happened at Deptford on 30 May 1593 was that they were there to fake Marlowe's death. It appeared in the Marlowe Society's research journal as well as being on my website, and was described by both the Society's Research Officer and its Chairman (neither of whom in fact believes that Marlowe wrote 'Shakespeare') at their AGM as 'the last word' on the event. Park Honan described it (privately) to me as 'brilliant', and cited it in his Marlowe biography. Much of it reappeared in my Hoffman and the Authorship, an essay which jointly won the prestigious Hoffman prize for 'a distinguished publication on Christopher Marlowe' in 2007 and is also available on-line. Yet I know for a fact that not a single article has been produced (nor anything in a book) by a 'reliable source' attempting to refute anything I said in either article, or someone would have pointed it out to me by now. But I am not allowed to say so. As far I can see, the RS tail of Wikipedia policy, as interpreted here, is being allowed to wag the NPOV dog, which I had thought was supposed to be paramount. Peter Farey (talk) 15:47, 16 February 2011 (UTC)

I fully understand your frustration, Peter. The problem is indeed technical, and in no way reflects upon the whims of random editors. Loosen RS on topics like this and you enact an open sesame season for all sorts of wild sourcing, as I think you yourself would have noticed here over the years. One just has to exercise patience, and wait for an RS (the Phd you mentioned earlier, for example) to paraphrase your central points. I would imagine that this is not as dilatory a prospect as it might appear. There are several indications that there will be an upsurge in commentary on the SAQ later this year (Emmerich). Shapiro, if I recall correctly, thinks the Marlovian hour may well return, given that the currently most popular candidate hasn't a leg to stand on, and persists as a cultural phenomenon for a variety of reasons unconnected with either evidence, reasonable inference or strong hypotheticals. The Marlovian theory has a seminal element in its favour lacking in all the other candidates, namely, the aesthetic dimension: the fluency of the dramatic mise en scène and mastery of the mighty line one would expect in a Shakespearean candidate. I concur with Honan's judgement re your paper. I still think however Elliott and Valenza's statistical work sinks the argument.

Yes, I do understand, and was really only using this (yet again) as an opportunity to vent my frustration that a genuinely informed discussion of what most of us these days tend to believe and why we believe it seems to be impossible. Thanks for the kind words! As for Elliott and Valenza, we must have chat about them some time, particular concerning whether they managed to eliminate any possible effect of Shakespeare's canon having, according to them, been written almost entirely after Marlowe's! Peter Farey (talk) 12:36, 17 February 2011 (UTC)

For the moment I suggest:-

Mainstream scholarship has rarely engaged with the theory, though some authorities dismiss the idea his death was faked as "no trail at all", or hold that it is unnecessary to refute it since the analogous claims for "Bacon and Oxford can be taken as representative".

One could object that 'Mainstream scholarship has rarely engaged with the theory' lacks an RS citation, of course. But those of us who have read widely in the area would reply that this is self-evident.Nishidani (talk) 16:40, 16 February 2011 (UTC)

Yes, that looks fine to me, although I note your later recommendation and go along with it. I take Paul's point below about "no trail at all", which came right at the end of an Appendix called "False Trails". Nicholl's words are worth quoting. "Another theory goes something like this. Marlowe did not die at Deptford. The affray was a blind: the body that was viewed by the coroner's jury was someone else's. Marlowe was spirited out of the country, and thereafter dedicated his life to writing plays. These plays went out under the nom de plume of 'William Shakespeare'. They contain many acrostics and anagrams that prove they are Marlowe's, but people still go on thinking they are by Shakespeare. This is no kind of trail at all." It is also worth mentioning that this reappeared in his revised edition after he had read my Sudden End essay and, whilst not agreeing with my conclusion, acknowledged that I had made a "strong case" for the faked death scenario, which as presented had nothing to do with the authorship question. Peter Farey (talk) 12:36, 17 February 2011 (UTC)

Park Honan's citation of Peter's essay is as follows "Peter Farey, looking into Middlesex records for 1589-92 finds six cases of death within the verge in which not even the Coroner of the Verge was involved." That's all he says. There is nothing in the book that suggests he endores the argument in the essay at all. What he said privately may be interpreted in many ways, butr we can't use it here anyway.

Well there is a little more than that, since he acknowledges my help (p.vii) and provided the URL for the Sudden End essay (p.403) related to his mention of "within the verge" and the illegality of the inquest (p.355) all of which he got from me. The point is therefore not that he endorses the theory (which he certainly doesn't, as he specifically indicates on p.355) or that we should 'use' his comment, but that clearly regards me as a reliable source of information where this is concerned. Peter Farey (talk) 12:36, 17 February 2011 (UTC)

I think the last paragraph as it stands become advocacy rather than description. I prefer Nishidani's reading, but I think the "no trail at all" phrase is confusing. The phrasing is odd: "some authorities dismiss the idea his death was faked as "no trail at all",". Can an "idea" be a "trail"? The phrase "some authorities" implies that more than one writer has used this exact phrase, not just Nicholl. I don't like the last part of the sentence, which could equally be added to the Derby section. These words do not apply to Marlowe uniquely, but to all other candidates. And once more this just is one individual explaining his particular choices. Derby gets very short shrift in the book. As author of the Derbyite theory page, I feel I am a sort of Honorary Derbyite, so I am rather miffed by the fact that his glory days are glossed over by Shapiro. Also, it's misleading to imply that Strats have somehow evaded the Marlovian position. Marlowe only became a notable candidate after 1955. Gibson devotes a lot of space to Marlovian arguments in The Shakespeare Claimants in 1962. By the '80s anti-Stratfordianism is beginning to be equated with Oxfordianism, and so many recent books only address Oxfordian arguments and the generic claims that Shakespeare can be somehow excluded as author. Paul B (talk) 18:16, 16 February 2011 (UTC)

Reading that last paragraph again, it's kind of a trainwreck. But, I wonder if any of it is necessary. If we just cut that final paragraph from the Marlowe summary, would the article suffer? Kaiguy (talk) 02:47, 17 February 2011 (UTC)

@Peter Farey: Just to clarify, my comments were focused on preparing the article for consideration as a Featured Article where strict interpretation of policies should be expected (I noticed the warm welcome you received above, and am not claiming any defect other than the policy problem). The text can always be tweaked in the future, and the place to start is probably at Marlovian theory. At the moment I think we should follow the suggestion by Kaiguy (possibly supported by Paul B's comment), and remove the last paragraph. My main reason for removal would be that this summary should simply state the case for the candidate (as the other summaries do), without commentary on failings in responses to the candidature. A secondary reason is that I hope that the text in the article will become stable very soon because a key requirement for a Featured Article is that editors have not recently been adding new text and then disagreeing over its wording (that is, I am pretty confident there is no easy way to resolve this issue while following Wikipedia's principles, so we might take another week or more to find some acceptable text—and that text would not be particularly helpful because it would essentially be a complaint rather than support for Marlowe's candidacy). Johnuniq (talk) 03:54, 17 February 2011 (UTC)

I think Johnuniq's point, following Paul and Kaiguy's notes, suggests the appropriate solution for the moment. The controversial addition is best worked out on the Marlovian page. What we have, unfortunately, will have to be sourced to Gibson's text, which is old, but as Paul reminds us, dealt with the topic quite extensively when it was first broached. The section is linked to the Marlovian page, and there the text is not encumbered by the rigorously austere criteria of a wiki article aspiring to FA level. So Peter's points can be retained there, readily studied by any reader who wishes for detail of this kind, until perhaps an RS is forthcoming which might permit us to include the point here. I hope we can prevail on your notable amenity here, Peter, to accept the logic of, if not endorse, this move as one dictated by the necessities of wiki protocols. Nishidani (talk) 12:09, 17 February 2011 (UTC)

Yes, that's OK. But which bit still has to be sourced to Gibson? Peter Farey (talk) 12:36, 17 February 2011 (UTC)

I read Gibson on line almost a year ago, but Tom had the book. Overnight I recalled however that Tom's approach was to present the arguments for candidacy without rebuttal, or reference to what mainstream scholarship argues. A quick glance over the other candidates will confirm that this policy has been adhered to. The additional point you added, and now removed, as per talk consensus, introduces a complaint that mainstream scholars ignore or dismiss the arguments, creating a kind of dissonance with the way the other three candidates' arguments have been described. By removing it, the text falls into the neutral descriptive framework Tom argued for.

You do still have a point about equal weight, Peter. Marlowe has less text that Bacon and Oxford, though now more favoured than Bacon. This is because a huge volume of literature exists for the former two, and academics have spent more time on describing it, and as hermeneutic sutlers drudging in the slicky slipstream of orthodoxy's learned cohorts, we've little choice but to trade in its currency. In that sense, perhaps, since Gibson does handle the theory at some length, I was minded to think we might eke out a little more from that source, in order to secure more of an appearance of equal representation, until the Phd you mentioned, and other books in the future, become available. I've only read Gibson's chapter in part, online. Tom has a copy of that, (and everything imaginable on this argument!), and I'm sure, when he gets back, he'll review our discussion and pitch in. Nishidani (talk) 12:23, 18 February 2011 (UTC)

@Peter Farey: I'll leave Nishidani to answer about sourcing to Gibson (might have been about the Marlovian theory article?). I don't think anything more need happen in this article at the moment. Thanks for removing that paragraph. I think the section is better when it is short, and more details should be at the main article. At one time, Tom wanted to strip each of the candidate sections down to something very short. I don't think that will happen at this stage, but I can see the argument to support that, and I'm thinking that later (in a couple of months) it might be useful to think about pruning each candidate section to about the current length of the Marlowe section (but let's not talk further about that now). Johnuniq (talk) 07:11, 18 February 2011 (UTC)

@Nishidani. Thank you, and if Gibson can indeed furnish us with some excuse for including those countless Marlovian arguments presented since he wrote his book, I'll be both surprised and delighted. Sadly, however, the fact is that there has been a disappointing reluctance in the academic world to refute or even read any Marlovian argument since Hoffman's.

Churchill necessarily had only Hoffman to go on.

Gibson could also attack only Hoffman, whilst completely misunderstanding (misrepresenting?) what Mendenhall, one of Hoffman's prime witnesses, had said.

Schoenbaum, surprisingly ignorant of just when Marlowe is alleged to have died, also restricted himself to Hoffman's arguments.

Jonathan Bate wrote a disgacefully inadequate review of Wraight's The Story that the Sonnets Tell for the Telegraph, which quite clearly showed that he hadn't even read it. And in his book The Genius of Shakespeare, based upon the essay he wrote as that year's prize-winner of the Calvin Hoffman (hypocritical or what?) prize, his only complaint was that Wraight's book was "coded autobiography", which "Elizabethans did not write", completely ignoring her actual claim that they were letters-in-verse which are something quite different. That he also referred to Marlowe's "participation in Sir Thomas (sic!) Walsingham's secret service" may also give us some cause for concern.

Who next? (ignoring Matus, whom I confess to not having read). Stanley Wells answers the Marlovian argument that—based upon all the evidence available—Marlowe's death was almost certainly faked, and that this makes it quite possible for him to have written 'Shakespeare', with the bald statement "What is perfectly clear is that he died". That it is, as he puts it, "one of the best recorded episodes in English literary history" doesn't prompt him to wonder, as we would, just why that might have been so.

And what of Shapiro? According to him, Bacon and Oxford are "representative" of all anti-Stratfordian argument. What crap - equalled only by his extraordinary claim that Calvin Hoffman obtained "permission to open the grave of Elizabethan spymaster Sir Francis (sic!) Walsingham", a claim which could have been made only by someone who who hadn't the slightest clue about what the Marlovian argument actually is.

This is of course just for the archive. That the feet of one's 'reliable sources' might actually be earthen must be of no relevance right now! :o) Peter Farey (talk) 17:59, 18 February 2011 (UTC)

It's pretty much a given that Anti-Stratfordians rail against academics for misrepresenting or ignoring them, but Peter, there's no point in it here. Please remember that this article is only supposed to provide a short summary of the main positions. It couldn't include the "countless Marlovian arguments presented since he [Gibson] wrote his book" even if there were another academic source that dealt with them, anymore than we can include all the countless new Oxfordian arguments that are created constantly, or the countless new "true authors" like John Florio, recently the subject of a book. We have to be selective. You have a whole article to be more expansive. BTW, Scott McCrea's 2005 book The Case for Shakespeare: The End of the Authorship Question does discuss Marlovian claims. I couldn't say how accurately it represents the true modern Marlovian consensus . Paul B (talk) 18:45, 18 February 2011 (UTC)

Peter, if post-Hoffman Marlovian arguments are neglected on wikipedia, there are only two sources for blame. Wikipedia's rules, and the failure of Marlovians (this applies generally to anti-Stratfordians) to simply sit down and earn a Phd in (Elizabethan) history. Afraid that such a topic might be the ruin of one's career? No problem, one simply writes (and the book is needed) a Phd neutrally examining the history of Marlovian theory. Several scholars who started from Oxfordian premises did things like this, such as Steven May and Ward Elliott. I am somnewhat flustered by this steadfast reluctance to adopt, provisorily, the system's rules. In any number of disciplines I am fairly familiar with on an academic basis, dissident opinions challenging a mainstream model, while using mainstream techniques, exist. The fundamental weakness of all heterodox analysts is that they refuse to understand the groundrules of the discipline whose results they desire to contest. They wish to box, while sneering at the Marquis of Queensbury rules. They would play cricket, but think it unfair that rules exist disallowing you to throw six bouncers and over.

Matus has nothing to say on the matter. A conflict in reports of a murder does not mean the murder of the victim, as designated in the reports, never took place. One could as equally say that the wording of the verdict was fixed, not to cover the ostensible victim's escape, but to cover any number of problematical consequences. As to Shapiro, what he says (p.229 Brit ed.) faithfully repeats Wadsworth's contemporary reportage (p.153), save for the fact that he lapses, in speaking of Sir Thomas Walsingham's tomb as that of his brother Sir Francis, who had of course died 3 years before Marlowe, and confusing the former with the spymaster who was his brother. Even Homer nods, abetted sometimes by Titivillus (as when Schoenbaum is made to have written 20th for the 30th of May, 1593). I don't know why people are upset about this. Use misprints or lapses of memory here and there to invalidate works while ignoring the testimony to the contrary of hundreds of precisely documented pages is any man's game, if he wish to play it. But the central detail, that Hoffman got permission to open Sir Thomas's tomb, is secure. As with Robert Eisenman's James the Brother of Jesus, very impressive countertheories can be built up on any historical set of evidences, if you presume all the historical data have been tampered with. History as we are given it in the archives becomes fodder for the palimpsestic scrivener. Your best bet is to wait for the Phd. that is in the works, (Unlike Oxfordians, who seem condemned to tantalic labour under that angst which Pascal describes when he writes: Il faut une infinie patience pour attendre toujours ce qui n'arrive jamais) and I for one, and I'm sure several here, will be happy to plead for it as an RS on these issues when it is approved and published.Nishidani (talk) 11:33, 19 February 2011 (UTC)

Thanks Paul and Nishidani. Yes, I do understand all of this, which was why I said it was "just for the archive" and added that smiley at the end. 'Railing' isn't really my style, you know, as Tom - with whom I have been quite amicably exchanging this sort of stuff for a dozen years or more - can probably confirm. Nor am I reluctant to adopt the system's rules (whilst reserving the right to express my feelings about them) as I would have hoped my actions here have demonstrated. Sorry, but at 72 I don't think I'll take up the recommended PhD route, but thanks for reminding me of Scott McRea, as I haven't read his book and really should. Peter Farey (talk) 12:17, 19 February 2011 (UTC)

Oxford Summary too long

[Title of this post refactored to save the TOC. Original title moved in full below in boldface. --Xover (talk) 09:13, 21 February 2011 (UTC)]

Oxford Summary too long, omitting academically endorsed major facts, and lacking Oxfordian participation, unlike the Marlovian summary which is written by an advocate.

I note that Marlovian Peter Farey is being allowed to rewrite the Marlowe summary. Equal treatment should be given to an Oxfordian regarding academically endorsed evidence for the Shakespeare authorship candidacy. The summary as a summary should be brief, deferring details to the article itself. The Oxfordian summary presently constituted is the only one that goes into secondary detail (like the discussion about secret codes and the PT and PTT sub-theories). Hence its length and emphasis are inconsistent with the rest of the summaries. The placement of the Oxfordian discussion after the Baconian one is another possible question I have: if as the section states, since 1920 the Oxford contention has overtaken the Baconian, why then is the Oxford discussion not placed accordingly in the reading? Oxford was older, so chronology has been discounted. The basis for Oxford’s prominence in the discussion originates with his contemporary prominence, for instance William Webbe’s remark that he was the most skillful and could challenge to himself that he was the most excellent of the courtly poets. This seems confirmed by Puttenham’s clear statement that if his work were publicized under his name he would be recognized as the first among equals in the aristocratic play-makers. Akrigg took note of Oxford's relations with Queen Elizabeth and with court life. As recently as the U.S. News and World Report, Oxford's travels, academic and cultural achievements, status as a noble, and education were cited as clues to possible candidacy. The linguistic evidence seems compelling from Fowler, Stritmatter, and Waugaman researches into parallel phrasing and subject matter. The Atlantic Monthly has taken on the supposed 1604 question, that no new plays or augmentations occurred after that point, corresponding to his death in June 1604.

These appear to be sound reasons for altering the sub-section, towit, briefer, more pertinent to the purpose, and written by someone, myself, less likely to ignore the major strengths of the candidate. At present all three standards are lacking. Zweigenbaum Zweigenbaum (talk) 22:55, 18 February 2011 (UTC)

I have made some suggestions here. Johnuniq (talk) 03:32, 19 February 2011 (UTC)

Peter Farey is not 'being allowed to write'. Peter, like any other editor, is collaborating, with commendable intelligence, flexibility and civility, to make improvements to the Marlovian theory section.

There were several considerations in the ordering of the candidates. (a) Historical priority (Bacon precedes Oxford, but Marlowe technically precedes Oxford also) and (b) quantity of material (both Oxford and Bacon have been the object of a huge amateur published output of 'theory', and both have been the object of extensive academic comment (c) contemporary profile (Oxford is showcased more than both Bacon and Marlowe. Smatprt consistently, being an Oxfordian, pressed for Oxford's priority. We have tried to calibrate these various pressures (coloured as they are by promotional interests) by choosing Bacon first, since he was the first historical candidate, and enjoyed a virtual monopoly for 6 decades (b) Oxford second, since he replaced Bacon as the primary candidate in public opinion (c) followed by Marlowe, who trumps Derby (sorry Paul) in terms of recognizability, and perhaps today in terms of the number of advocates.

The material re Oxford's prominence in Elizabethan times is irrelevant. We are dealing with scholarly assessments, not the rhetoric of patronage and court flattery in status-obsessed Elizabethan literary representations.

As for Fowler, Stritmatter, and Waugaman, as RS mention them, they can be used. Stritmatter is already present.Nishidani (talk) 12:08, 19 February 2011 (UTC)

Don't worry about dumping Derby at the bottom. My heart really belongs to Anne Whateley. I read Derbyism from duty. Ross's book "The Story of Anne Whateley" is the only Anti-Strat text I ever enjoyed reading. Lefranc's "Sous le masque..." was a trial. It's easy to see why it never really made it over the channel. It's full of the worst gloire-grubbing French nationalist sentiment. Paul B (talk) 21:56, 21 February 2011 (UTC)

If it will cheer you up, Derby will rise from the lowest ranks as soon as I do the Henry Neville candidate for Shakespeare authorship, which, despite my best efforts, will secure bottom place.Nishidani (talk) 22:01, 21 February 2011 (UTC)

I'd revert Zeigenbaum's major edit on the grounds that (a) it susbtantially alters a text for which consensus exists (b) introduces poor sources, some of which are either not RS or dubious as such. There is a good argument for shortening some of the Bacon and Oxford material, but it is best done on this work page instead of engaging in individual challenges.Nishidani (talk) 19:32, 19 February 2011 (UTC)

Thank you for your comment. I do not consider that I challenged anything or anyone. The changes made and since reverted are factual and supportable with acceptable sourcing. Kindly expand on how they are poor, in comparison to that which existed before the alteration. The modification brought the Oxford sub-article into size and factual specificity comparable to the other summaries. These are helpful advances.

1) To discuss the alterations specifically, although I have already addressed several of these points in the editing comments above, citing sound reasons, I will be happy to restate them as I did to Johnuniq upon inquiry.

2) The long section about Looney (paragraph 2) belongs in the history section, or in the Oxfordian Theory article. It could stay, if it were trimmed down. The Looney scholarship is no longer relied upon by the Oxfordian community, since so much other more specific material has been found. It is an important artifact. The best place is in the History section.

3) The two mainstream refutations do not belong, as the other summaries include none and it was agreed by the present editors not to present mainstream arguments in these summaries. Thus "No documentary evidence connecting Oxford to the authorship of the works has been found" and "Although Oxford died in 1604 with 10 Shakespeare plays yet to be written according to the most widely accepted chronology" do not belong in the summary. They will be immediately contradicted by the references following the statements of the summary text, which makes them puzzling, out of place, and liable to make a reader think someone is pulling a fast one on them in the summary. In the context of the treatment of the other summaries, this could be interpreted as gratuitous bias and we wish to avoid that.

4) The longest paragraph ( paragraph 4, about Frisbee and codes) does not belong at all. Detail such as that goes in the Oxfordian Theory article. Presently it is being given far too much space, too much weight, and does not represent the main points raised by most Oxfordians. US News and Atlantic magazines summarize examples of what the major Oxfordian points are. The references are included should the reader seek them beyond what is in the sub-article itself.

5) The long PT description does not belong in a brief summary. It too should go in the Oxfordian Theory article. Placement in the summary can be interpreted as an invitation to ignore the evidence because this aspect of the Oxford contention is considered shocking and sensational and incredible, despite a certain amount of documented evidence supporting such exploratory theories.

6) I suggest that the summary end with the last line of the new text just added. That would make it the most concise summary of the major Oxfordian points, as evidenced by the references provided following the new text.

7) The Minerva Britanna graphic need not be in the Oxfordian summary. This is another example of detailed evidence presented as the strength of the Oxfordian contention, whereas it is really a side-light, showing how the literary types of the era amused themselves and each other by communicating through puzzle means what they did not feel safe to say outright. First, it is not a "major" theme of Oxfordian research, and second, it was used by Baconians as well, so is not specific to the Oxford case. It could go into the history section included in the Bacon expanded discussion (since Baconians used it first), or in one or more of the theory articles. Regardless, it should not be where it is, giving the wrong impression of what kind of evidence is emphasized in Oxfordian studies, (or perhaps what a Stratfordian writer would wish was typical Oxfordian evidence), and--returning to the important standard of brevity observed elsewhere,--it just makes the summary longer.

8) This discussion is really about content. If there is a problem with reference formatting, which is not my concern, then you appear to have several editors that can correct the format issues.

9) In terms of RS, you have already established that the Wall Street Journal is RS. The same applies to US News and World Report and Atlantic Monthly. They are RS by every definition I can find. If one of these magazines reported that Oxford was Looney's fraud on history and scholarship, would its report be ignored?

10) There is absolutely no prohibition on using Primary Sources. No interpretation is being given to them, they are simply being quoted. Besides, there are plenty of RS sources that quote the same material. If you want to substitute one of them, I have no objection. Again, we are discussing content here.

11) To quote ArbCom: " Where an article concerns a theory that does not have majority support in the relevant scholarly community, the article must fairly describe the division of opinion among those who have extensively studied the matter." This in no way limits RS the way you describe. "...those who have extensively studied the matter" is the key here. I note that the only abstention said "I think this would benefit from a clarification to ensure that it's only those views from the scholarly community or accepted experts - even minority ones - that are included, rather than just anyone who has a BA in English Lit." Thus even the abstainer agrees that accepted experts - even minority ones - can be sourced. This appears to support the use of sources as seen in the section (here reverted for alleged poor sources).

12)I note the remarks by Johnuniq and also Nishidani that the Marlovian perspective was not "allowed" but was the result of collaboration by Farey and the majority editors. It is a fact that the Marlovian candidacy is not the threat to the Shakespeare establishment that the Oxfordian scholarship represents. While I do not object to Farey receiving fair treatment, it will likely soon be seen as unfair for the majority group to specifically resist one candidacy's use of and reference to scholarship and at the same time extend every courtesy to another. The disinterested observer will inevitably conclude the majority editors are using a double-standard. We would not wish to convey such an impression.

13)Regarding Nishidani's assertion in explanation of his revert that Oxford's prominence in the literary world of the Elizabethan era is irrelevant, then so would Shakespeare's contemporary fame be irrelevant. Harvey referred to Oxford as the author of Venus and Adonis, published under the name William Shakespeare. Eight Shakespeare plays were performed at court during the Christmas play season following Oxford's passing. Another series followed the death of his wife in 1612. No other honor for husband and wife ever occurred in the history of the English monarchy. Such contemporary renown is relevant. We cannot by fiat squelch history unfavorable to our predisposed views. Thus, the reference, in my edit, to Oxford's contemporary literary reputation, sufficient that James I referred to him as "The Great Oxford", is substantially pertinent to answering this important identity question and certainly appropriate to a summary of reasons for considering the possibility of his authorship. with best wishes, Zweigenbaum (talk) 02:32, 20 February 2011 (UTC) Regarding Nishidani's reversion of the modified text, for ease of discussion and comparison, I have placed them side by side in the article. In response to Nishidani's doubt that there is such a grouping as "most Oxfordians", I am familiar with the individuals and the publications involved, and the very evidence most emphasized as Oxfordian in this article are least valued by those organizations and publications: the Minerva Brittana puzzle and the variations of the Prince Tudor theory. There is ample evidence exclusive of these topics leading to a convincing proof of Oxfordian identity with the Shakepeare author. In fact few Oxfordians are cognizant of the Cardano Grille code or the Latin anagram tradition that generated these studies. This is why I stated before that, as a Marlovian was respected to explain the Marlovian theory, so should an Oxfordian be respected to know and to cite sources both primary and secondary, regarding the Oxfordian subject matter. Stratfordian editors need not fear to be informed of existing or previously neglected evidence. Zweigenbaum (talk) 05:27, 20 February 2011 (UTC)

(1) ‘The changes made and since reverted are factual and supportable with acceptable sourcing.’

This is an obiter dictum or Sir Oracle style of argumentation. It takes the form: ‘I think so, therefore it is.’

In editing, at a late stage of its drafting an article aspiring to the strictest criteria for wikipedia material, major proposals such as yours should be first presented to the community of editors engaged with the page.

Your sourcing is not acceptable according to the strong criteria used over the past several months. Changes are not 'factual'. Changes may contain reference to facts.

Your new sources, to an article that almost exclusively relies on the best academic works, consist of:-

• Bill Bryson. He's an agreeable popular writer. He has no first hand knowledge of Shakespearean scholarship.
• Michael Satchell writing in U.S. News & World Report. Satchell is a journalist who has covered, from an Oxfordian perspective, a few events. He is not an authority on the argument, nor the Elizabethan period, nor the state of Shakespearean studies. The only substantive addition to the argument he has made, as far as I know, was to mention that Keanu Reeves was a confirmed supporter of the Oxfordian theory.
• William Webbe and George Puttenham are primary sources. In the secondary literature, their remarks are interpreted as pieces of flattery paying obeisance to the ranking system of Elizabethan court society, and not as testimonies to the known facts of the period. In any case, the article avoids using evidence from primary sources, unless it is cited from a reliable and pertinent secondary source in the scholarship on this area. Both Webbe and Puttenham are thus cited in many RS for the period.
• Captain Bernard Mordaunt Ward's 1928 bio. of de Vere is a respectable if highly dated piece of scholarship from an Oxfordian perspective. We have numerous modern academic sources, including Alan Nelson and Steven May, who make the same point, and who are already used in the article.
• Irwin Smith 's 1964 Shakespeare's Blackfriars Playhouse: its history and its design, is a respectable source, but the material from it is already in several sources used here, including Nelson and May. Occam's razor applies.
• G.P.V. Akrigg's 1968 Shakespeare and the Earl of Southampton, is a respectable source, but for a point that is risible. All members of Elizabeth’s court knew each other. It is not an ‘Oxfordian argument’ to note the obvious, any more than it is a Baconian argument to note that Bacon knew the same people, namely Elizabeth 1 and Henry Wriothesley.
• 'his academic and cultural achievements'.

According to Nelson he had no academic achievements. If you can find an academic or reliable updated Elizabethan specialist source arguing to the contrary, in explaining the Oxfordian position, by all means use that. His MAs were granted as formal gestures or compliments by the universities. His ‘cultural’ achievements consisted in, like many aristocrats of his day, keeping players and being the object of many book dedications by authors seeking his favour and the prestige of being conferred recognition by him. Both points are, again, sourced to a newspaper (U.S.News & World Report), which is ridiculously incongruous given the high quality of sourcing required of the article. That, like many aristocrats (Henry Neville etc.) de Vere travelled widely does not need referencing to a modern American newspaper. It is in Nelson, who is RS for this kind of detail.

• To use the precedent of the Wall Street Journal, as grounds for citing from any number of other American newspapers is misbegotten. The Wall Street Journal was used for an interview with the Elizabethan scholar James Shapiro on precisely the subject of this article. The newspaper articles you wish to cite refer information from people who have no formal credentials in the scholarship on this argument.
• William Plumer Fowler's Shakespeare Revealed in Oxford's Letters, fails all tests as an RS for this article. A former fisherman, minor poet and lawyer who presided over the Boston Shakespeare Club, and was an Oxfordian, is not a reliable source on the details of de Vere’s life or Shakespeare.Nishidani (talk) 15:22, 20 February 2011 (UTC)

Generally, therefore, your twin attempts to edit 'en bloc destabilize the format, and presume to use sources that turn out to violate the strict criteria for an article of this kind. For this reason, I have placed your proposal below, where it can be discussed as an alternative proposal.

• (3)

  'The two mainstream refutations do not belong, as the other summaries include none and it was agreed by the present editors not to present mainstream arguments in these summaries.'

You are misrepresenting the text. The two points made:

(a) 'Although Oxford died in 1604 with 10 Shakespeare plays yet to be written according to the most widely accepted chronology, Oxfordians date the plays earlier and say that unfinished works were revised by other playwrights and released after his death.' (b) 'No documentary evidence connecting Oxford to the authorship of the works has been found.'

are not 'refutations' but statements of fact freely admitted by Oxfordians. Perhaps 'most Oxfordians' would be better for (a) since some maintain that de Vere lived on, like Marlowe, after a faked death.

• (7) 'The Minerva Britanna graphic need not be in the Oxfordian summary.'

We have only your word for it that this is ‘not a major theme’ in Oxfordian theories. RS mention it in that connection, and our text rightly notes that it is adduced by both Baconians and Oxfordians. Is the problem here the fact that the Minerva Britanna graphic is shared grounds for both Baconism and Oxfordianism?

• (8) 'If there is a problem with reference formatting, which is not my concern, then you appear to have several editors that can correct the format issues.'

Despite being new here, you have already mastered one stylke of reference formatting, one incidentally used by a previous and banned editor. To say ‘it is not my concern’ reads ‘I don’t care less for what you guys agree on. If you don’t like my style, adjust it yourselves. I won’t.’

• 'In response to Nishidani's doubt that there is such a grouping as "most Oxfordians", I am familiar with the individuals and the publications involved, and the very evidence most emphasized as Oxfordian in this article are least valued by those organizations and publications.'

Again, neither you, Peter Farey, nor I nor anyone else can edit here proclaiming our intimate knowledge sufficiently vouchsafes for the reliability of the information given. We filter partisan opinions through RS to avoid precisely the obvous abuses to which this kind of confient self-assertion lends itself.Nishidani (talk) 15:39, 20 February 2011 (UTC)

Zweigenbaum's proposal for rewriting of the Oxford section. Text and discussion

Proposed text as revised with Nishidani's challenged sources adjusted.

The leading present-day candidate is Edward de Vere, 17th Earl of Oxford. After being proposed in the 1920's, Oxford rapidly overtook Bacon to become within two decades the most popular alternative candidate.

Oxfordians point to the acclaim of Oxford's contemporaries regarding his talent as a poet and a playwright, his reputation as a hidden poet, and his personal connections to London theatre and the contemporary playwrights of Shakespeare's day. They also note his personal relationships with Queen Elizabeth I and the Earl of Southampton, his knowledge of Court life, his extensive education, his academic and cultural achievements, and his wide-ranging travels through France and Italy to what would later become the locations of many of Shakespeare's plays.

The case for Oxford's authorship is also based on perceived similarities between Oxford's biography and events in Shakespeare's plays, sonnets and longer poems; parallels of language, idiom, and thought between Oxford's personal letters and the Shakespearean canon; and underlined passages in Oxford's personal bible, which Oxfordians believe correspond to quotations in Shakespeare's plays. Confronting the issue of Oxford's death in 1604, Oxfordian researchers cite examples they say imply the writer known as "Shakespeare" or "Shake-speare" died before 1609, and point to 1604 as the year regular publication of "new" or "augmented" Shakespeare plays stopped.

---

The following are Nishidani's remarks prior to revision above:

As far as I can see, the substance of this alternative proposal consists in its different sourcing, since most of the points made are available in the prior text. Zweigenbaum's contention therefore must be interpreted as a proposal, essentially, to whittle down the version we have. That is not unreasonable, though removing good material from a fine article to dump it down in the obscurity of a notoriously poorly edited and almost unreadable page, can be taken as instrumental to image-maintenance.

My own position is that the length of the two is due to the fact that they have been intensivcely studied by academics, unlike Marlowe and the Derby candidates. An abundance of learned commentary makes the more extensive treatment of these two almost obligatory.

I would suggest however that if and wherever we, as Zweigenbaum asks, decide to thin down the present version, the removed passages be copied and pasted on to the Oxfordian theory of Shakespeare authorship page. Nishidani (talk) 15:54, 20 February 2011 (UTC) ---------

In response to the above remarks and ideas: The point of my original proposal and its demonstration is that too much text, and of the wrong kind, is presently in force as a summary of the Oxfordian contention. It is done mainly by non-Oxfordian minds with all that that might affect in terms of selecting the salient facts. At this point, Nishidani seems to be not too far from mine in terms of the brevity issue, and if he wants to solve the issue by adding favored texts into the body of the sub-article that follows--that are properly sourced and credited--it makes for a good compromise under these circumstances. The reader can take it from there, seeing two points of view.

As to the sourcing coming strictly from acceptable scholarship, that term being understood according to the lights of a group unanimously representing the Stratford persuasion, I would only suggest reading the ArbCom ruling and correcting the prevailing understanding, especially in such instances of majority and minority sourcing as described below:

ArbCom: "Where an article concerns a theory that does not have majority support in the relevant scholarly community, the article must fairly describe the division of opinion among those who have extensively studied the matter." and also note the one arbitrator who said " I think this would benefit from a clarification to ensure that it's only those views from the scholarly community or accepted experts--even minority ones--that are included, rather than just anyone who has a BA in English Lit." To me that intent to be fair is achieved by Oxfordian input, not exclusion of it.

On the question of U.S. News and World Report being/not being a properly used reference or any other news periodical for that matter--sources such as WSJournal, NY Times, Atlantic, Harpers, etc.--I would advise that Wikipedia policies do consider mainstream news sources with a reputation for fact checking as Reliable Sources. You may or may not like the reporter. His facts have been checked. Unless the given periodical shows evidence to the contrary it is reliable. No one editor may unilaterally decide what periodicals are unallowable for reference in this article. If Nishidani intends to take such a position, then the proper approach is to go to dispute resolution in order to formally challenge the Wikipedia policy.

Regarding Nishidani's particular comment about sourcing formats, refer to the following link and note that many of the same references were included in the former version--I have simply copied them over and adopted that format, since it is suggested here: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Referencing_for_beginners#Information_to_include

If you or your colleagues have decided on a different referencing format, please provide those instructions or a link to them. I am doing the best I can to fumble forward in this system. But I remind you that sourcing-format issues are not a legitimate cause for removing material. Regarding the second-hand view conveyed in Nishidani's post that my attitude on non-content questions is I'll put down what I like and the rest of you can fix it--on the contrary, this is a group effort and if someone wants to reformat the sources, as my recent listing of reasons were re-formatted by someone, they are welcome to do so. There is no requirement that every submission be perfect. In fact Wikipedia specifically encourages collaboration. Add what you can and how best you can and if someone wants formatting done differently, he or she may change it. We are all volunteers and have our different skills and emphases to contribute. That's the Wiki way, I hope. Zweigenbaum (talk) 23:04, 20 February 2011 (UTC)

"You may or may not like the reporter. His facts have been checked." Please clarify what you mean by that. "Facts" about a minority theory in an article promoting that theory are not "checked" in the sense of checking a fact such as Pearl Harbor was attacked by the Japanese on Dec. 7, 1941. Fact-checking in a periodical is usually limited to checking the spelling of names and the attribution of quotations, and does not in any sense bestow credibility on the statements being offered by those quoted. Invoking the phrase "fact checking" merely means that those aforementioned tasks are done and does not affect the reliability of a text or its suitability for this article as a source, all of which should be the best and most reputable sources, which in this article would be scholarly sources.

We already have been through dispute resolution. Re-arguing the case is not helpful nor conducive to improving this article. Tom Reedy (talk) 03:13, 21 February 2011 (UTC)

Welcome back Mr. Reedy. We are not re-arguing the case but making it briefer and more representative of the relevant facts. Nishidani brought up that US News & World Report was not sufficient as a reliable source. The Wikipedia guidelines accept mainstream periodicals as reliable because they fact-check. If you understand fact-check to mean punctuation, et al, I don't know any mainstream magazine that agrees. Their lawyers would be out of a job. Mentioning US News & World Report hardly gives undue weight to the minority view, when the magazine is quoted regarding the novelty of that view. If you forbid even the Wall Street Journal as a source, it is an unfortunate advertisement that credibility is fading for your position. I accept the reliability of the Wall Street Journal even though it panned the Oxfordian position. Wikipedia considers the WSJ reliable. It is not up to individuals in the majority to decide that ONLY scholarly resources apply to an issue discussed by the minority. The guideline aims for a high level, not a unduly narrowed one. I will be ready for another dispute arbitration, about major periodicals' credibility in Wikipedia articles, when you are prepared to contest them. Isolating sourcing only to the Stratfordian chestnuts, i.e., even excluding major magazines, after going to the extent of characterizing the other side as "fringe" and "lunatic fringe" might look somewhat cultish. This would not serve the credibility of the article.

Regarding Nishidani's useful suggestion about stating the central points relevant to the Oxford summary paragraphs, ["it would be helpful if you could provide your input on what there strikes you as central, and what peripheral, to the Oxfordian case."] and then transferring the detailed discussion to the appropriate sub-article:

Everything after the added text at the top of the sub-section is either peripheral or repetitive. Going into the details of Minerva Britanna, George Frisbees codes, Prince Tudor and PT2--is hardly a summary of the Oxford contention. If a given issue really divides the Oxfordians, as the present Prince Tudor discussion states, then it obviously isn't a central point, or they would have already split or disbanded over it.

As shown in the article and above, the Oxford Summary's central points are obvious: Oxford's reputation as poet and playwright, the import of the de Vere Geneva bible; his personal relationship with the Queen and with Southampton; his London theatrical activities (Blackfriars, etc.), his travels and far-ranging knowledge (as recognized by tutors and contemporaries), his reputation as an outstanding but covert author after his youth as per Puttenham. His status as the leading candidate for the last ninety years is appropriate to emphasize, since such recognition grows substantially by the year and the Bacon reputation has correspondingly declined. After the Stritmatter-Kositsky article in the Review of English Studies, the 1604 parameter for any further topical plays or author augmentations is a plus for the Oxfordian position. These are central arguments. To ignore, efface, or minimize them would be valuing the peripheral over the central. If the new text states the case more concisely and pertinently, that should not matter to the Stratfordian contention, given the overwhelming space and detail provided the latter in the article. Zweigenbaum (talk) 07:19, 21 February 2011 (UTC)

It is not satisfactory to treat the article as a draft page where text you want is inserted at the start of the Oxford section, while leaving the text that was already there (which you clearly do not want)—I am referring to this diff. If you propose any further significant changes, I suggest the best strategy would be to work on them in a draft page. I would be happy to copy the wikitext somewhere, probably one of the existing sandboxes previously used, and I would clean stuff like "1920's" (no apostrophe), and remove the extraneous spaces and line breaks. You could then edit the draft to show what you propose. Regarding the changes you wanted in connection with the U.S. judges: It is not good encyclopedic practice to list celebrities that support a particular point of view. Those celebrities are experts in U.S. law, and have no track record regarding English history of the 1600s. Consider what an article would look like if the "for" side listed all the celebrities supporting their case, while the "against" side listed theirs. It is just not how things are done here (and bear in mind that there was no support for the issues you raised at the NPOV, RS and NOR noticeboards, so your understanding of how articles should be sourced may not be complete). At any rate, if you want to work on suitable wording, I suggest that you should work in a draft where you will be able to take a few days to get it right, while responding to any points raised here or on the draft's talk page. Then, other editors would be in a position to assist merging improvements to the article, or to state opinions on why no merge should occur. Having a draft would allow other editors to evaluate the competing claims. Currently, it is too confusing with these long comments and unfinished article edits to know what to think. Johnuniq (talk) 09:31, 21 February 2011 (UTC)

Yes, I have just undone Zw's (Nina-esque?) edit where he just inserted his proposed text before the existing text, making the section longer, and incoherent. Having said this, I think Zw does make some valid points that are being unfairly dismissed. (I have only been looking at the article for a month and I'm already getting deja vu). More on this later today... Poujeaux (talk) 10:03, 21 February 2011 (UTC)

It's not a matter of unfair dismissal. His points, in so far as they are intelligible in these opinionated walls of text, have been addressed. Of everything said, the point that the text on Oxford may be rather long may be relevant, and can be discussed. He has not responded to the cautions and technical objections other than by repeating his initial assertions, which is precisely what other Oxfordian editors tend to do, or have done in the past. It is also apparent that, at this delicate passage towards FA review, his behaviour in ignoring requests to make proposals for major revisions on the talk page or in a sandbox, has the appearance of an invitation to established editors to editwar (here, here and here), against reservations repeated on the talk page by other editors), and thus deprive the article of the central pillar of stability which is one of the governing criteria for FA review. For a year now I have been asking myself why so many editors from that quarter refuse to fix the delapidated mess that is The Oxfordian theory of Shakespeare Authorship, where they are free to devote their undoubted energies to a comprehensive exposition of the belief system, and, instead, engage in persistent disruptive attempts to block the completion of this article, which deals with the whole subject, not just de Vere. We are being dragged through Arbcom, forum-shopping runs riot, DYK presentations for forked off material are challenged, just as established editors have returned to fine tune a long, complex, and comprehensive piece of labour written under the most exacting conditions of wiki protocols.Nishidani (talk) 11:14, 21 February 2011 (UTC)

It would be help if you would say what the valid points were. Paul B (talk) 11:45, 21 February 2011 (UTC)

Will do later. Meanwhile, here's a challenge for Paul and/or Nishi - please prove me wrong. Look at Zw's 13 points and find one that is at least partly valid and make a minor modification to the page accordingly. Poujeaux (talk) 13:17, 21 February 2011 (UTC)

Tom already did that in these edits. --Xover (talk) 13:33, 21 February 2011 (UTC)

I set up a draft page here and solicited edits to address Smatprt's and Peter Farey's concerns a few weeks ago. Peter utilized it; Smatprt could not, of course, since he was topic-banned and the arbitration was going on, but it is still available. It has the main article lede, the old draft version and the new mainpage version for comparison.

Pardon me if I seem to not be acting in good faith, but we seem to be regressing back to the same conditions that brought on the arbitration, i.e. a war of attrition to destabilise the page and prevent it from achieving FA status. The fact that we're now re-arguing acceptable sources when the arbitration made it clear that the best sources from experts were to be used and the fact that Zweigenbaum is now using the same editing strategies that were specifically referred to--dropping major edits into the page "for discussion" instead of searching for concensus; using the talk page to argue the anti-Stratfordian case instead of how to improve the article, and impugning the motives of other editors as if their main concern were to push their POV--all cause me concern. Tom Reedy (talk) 14:07, 21 February 2011 (UTC)

Thanks for the discussion. Please note the second half of the ruling - "Where an article concerns a theory that does not have majority support in the relevant scholarly community, the article must fairly describe the division of opinion among those who have extensively studied the matter." That is mandated support for I am trying to do and I believe that I am conforming to the ArbCom decisions. In fact, they clearly say that if something cannot be worked out at talk, then dispute resolution is the way to go. The fact that some of these same things have been talked to death on these talk pages, with no resolution, indicates these problems have not been solved, and no consensus has been established. If you want to challenge every edit I make and every source I add, then maybe the only alternative is to take it to the next level. I hope not. I hope you will begin to see the validity of brevity and concentrating on major points. I see that Peter Farey is doing his best to conform to the various rules you have set for this page, and so am I. But I am also trying to utilize the rules set by ArbCom. They said that RS is defined as experts on the subject. They did not say that is restricted to mainstream Shakespeare scholars with PhD's. There are experts on the subject that are in no way represented in this article. Price, Ogburn, Anderson, etc., seem to have been banned, even though they are acknowledged as experts on the minority views. Even given ArbCom's rulings, I have said to Nishidani, and will say again, that if the information I have added has sources you prefer, then feel free to add them. But deleting content because you don't like the sources, is not the way to do that. Nishidani has stated that the information I wanted to add can be sourced better. So be it. I haven o objection to your adding your own sources for Meres and Puttenham. That is minor in comparison to what seems to be a systematic attempt to exclude all minority input, even with otherwise acceptable references. Want to source to May? Do so. But I don't believe any other forum has so taken exception to any of the major points I have added. I am willing to compromise on which sources we use, as long as the content is accurate and fairly describes the central (as Nishidani termed them) Oxfordian points. At this point, the summary is still littered with far too many minor details. It reads like a caricature of the Oxfordian theory instead of a fair representation. Could we agree on trimming down the 2nd half of the summary? To my eye the brief to the point edit tells more than the oddball features you think/prefer to be is Oxfordian theory. If we could work together on the objective of brief but salient, perhaps we can overcome this impasse. Most of the jargon being thrown about to discount my contributions and objections, threaten action, associate me with Nina Green, are static, in comparison to the simple objective, be fair. There is a minority view and it is not legal to ignore it. Please consider these points.Zweigenbaum (talk) 17:33, 21 February 2011 (UTC)

You say "There are experts on the subject that are in no way represented in this article. Price, Ogburn, Anderson, etc., seem to have been banned, even though they are acknowledged as experts on the minority views." No, that's not so, not at all. Sorry. See WP:RS. If a minority view is not articulated and accepted within academia as a legitimate theory there is no such thing as "expertise" in it in your sense. A person who promotes the theory that aliens built the pyramids or that Mossad destroyed the Twin Towers may be an "expert" in your sense - they may have lots of arguments and information. But only a scholar who studies the theories is an expert in our sense. Knowing a lot about a subject does not make one an expert in the relevant sense, since the "subject" itself is a walled garden. If I decide to write a book proving that Richard Greene really wrote Shakespeare, then in your sense I will be an "expert" on the topic - the expert in fact - but that will have no value according to WP:RS. Anyone is an expert on their own opinions. However, if a scholar studies and comments on my theory, then that scholar is an expert on the theory. Paul B (talk) 18:00, 21 February 2011 (UTC)

Zweigenbaum, I think perhaps you've misunderstood the purpose of the relevant section in this article. It is supposed to be quite similar to the lede of its Main article (or rather, to the in potentia ideal version of it); that is, it should summarize the major points of the subject while also serving as a stand-alone introduction. In other words, its purpose is explicitly not to present the best current arguments of the Oxfordian theory, but rather it is to summarize all aspects of the theory; including its more ludicrous variants, its weak arguments, its historical form and reception, its current state, and how it is generally received among academics of the field. Thus, for instance, the Prince Tudor variants most certainly belong there (especially considering it has apparently inspired a major motion picture). In considering this it might help you to think of it this way: it doesn't matter what you or I find the most important points about the Oxfordian theory, it is what the mainstream scholars who have surveyed it consider the most important points that matter. For instance, the features and arguments of the Oxfordian theory that S. Schoenbaum, Irvin Matus, and James Shapiro highlight are what should determine what we cover in this article. And that's entirely irrespective of whether they subscribe to those arguments or not. --Xover (talk) 19:52, 21 February 2011 (UTC)

Well, Zw's point (2) certainly makes sense. The Looney para in the Oxford section can be trimmed since it duplicates a para in the history section. Poujeaux (talk) 22:24, 21 February 2011 (UTC)

Similarly point 7, the Minerva thing. Note that this is not mentioned in the main Oxfordian article - which fits with Zw's claim that this is not a major Oxfordian argument. The source is a web page by Terry Ross, who I note does not have a PhD  :) Poujeaux (talk) 22:37, 21 February 2011 (UTC)

If you manage to pick out salient points there that would be good, because I frankly am having trouble finding them in between the surrounding rhetoric. If there is more there that we should be looking at, then please do point it out: as I believe Tom has mentioned previously, it would be useful to have the input of an Oxfordian (provided, of course, that it is constructive and collaborative).
As to the specific points, I disagree that the Looney paragraph duplicates the History section and that it can be significantly trimmed in the Oxford section. Looney gets all of a single sentence in History (i.e. there's no overlap worth the mention), and Looney was a watershed event in the Oxfordian theory (so say all my sources, at least) so it really needs to be mentioned in the Oxford section. Even had there been significant duplication between the sections I think that would be the case. Incidentally, I think this is where Zweigenbaum lost us on this point: his argument seems to be that Looney should be removed because Oxfordians no longer rely on his research (they seem, in fact, to be a little embarrassed by it; probably because it's been so thoroughly debunked), which misses the fact that it was, in the context, historically significant (and hence should be included). Your argument, though I don't agree, at least has merit.
On the Minerva Britanna thing, Zweigenbaum actually just argued that the graphic should be removed (which it has, as I noted somewhere above). You expand on this to argue that even the mention of it should be removed from the text. I suspect you make this argument somewhat on shaky foundations: see The Not-Too-Hidden Key to Minerva Britanna (by Roger Stritmatter, the only Oxfordian with a PhD, if you'll pardon the levity) for how seriously they take it, and Terry Ross' rebuttal Oxfordian Myths: The Oxford Anagram in "Minerva Britanna" for more information on where and to what extent they rely on it (there is a further full-length article, by Peter Dickson, but it's no longer available online). That being said, however, it seems neither Shapiro nor Schoenbaum mention the Minerva Britanna argument, so I am at least ready to entertain the argument that this particular point might best be elided from the Oxford section. What do the other surveys of the topic (Matus, in particular) have to say on this?
Finally, I don't think we should overstate the length problem for the Oxford section: the rule of thumb would be something like 4–5 paragraphs, and the section is now exactly 5 (of which one is very short). In terms of raw length, Derby and Marlowe are a smidgen too short; Bacon is about right; and Oxford is perhaps a mere smidgen too long. There is no pressing need to address length in these sections as such. --Xover (talk) 02:24, 22 February 2011 (UTC)

Unless I have glanced through it in too cursory a fashion, there is no mention of Peacham's image in Matus either. However, Zweigenbaum's authority here on its relevance is dubious, for the article surveys the historical field not the most recent consensus among one group of Oxfordians. Both Looney and Eva Clark grappled with it, because it was used by Baconians for their candidate, and it was soon found to support de Vere. In recent articles, forum debates and books by David Roper, Peter Dickson, Roger Stritmatter, Lynne Kosinsky, Mark Anderson, Peter Dawkins, and William Farina, to cite a few, Minerva Britanna resurfaces consistently, and Stritmatter certainly argues strongly for it, as a contemporary Oxfordian. As I highlighted at Zweigenbaum's page, it is not an adequate test of relevance to be told by one editor from the deVerean fold that this is old hat. Deconstructed, all Zweigenbaum is saying is that many Oxfordians he knows do not accept their colleague Stritmatter's revival of the argument. As a general rule, it is a constant feature of ths kind of debate that old arguments, long forgotten, are fished out to be refurbished as new evidence. (The Ashbourne portrait proof was buried in 1979, and yet has recently begun to be revived). What Zweigenbaum's argument alludes to is the fact Noemi Magri was thought, by a good many Oxfordians, to have dealt a fatal blow to Eva Clark's interpretation in her 1999 article (De Vere Society Newsletter, May 1999). Stritmatter, a year later, found a way to conserve the demolishd thesis that it alludes to de Vere. This is quit erecent stuff, Stritmatter is a big name among Oxfordians, and therefore Zweigenbaum's argument represents just one view among many, entertained by the Oxfordian coterie. Therefore, given that it is both a notable historical argument for both Baconians and Oxfordians, and still defended by sundry members of the de Verean school, I see no reason why it should not be included.Nishidani (talk) 12:16, 22 February 2011 (UTC)

Zweigenbaum suggested moving the image. It was moved. It is there to illustrate a general point - how motifs are "discovered" to have hidden meanings and that proponents of different True Authors often find quite distinct hidden meanings in the same words or emblems. Note that Zweigenbaum, apparently believes in the hidden meaning ("showing how the literary types of the era amused themselves and each other by communicating through puzzle means what they did not feel safe to say outright"). He just thinks it's not a major point. The general point - about coded messages - is a major one, and it is useful to have actual examples rather than just generic statements that Baconians, Oxfordians et al find them. Paul B (talk) 11:04, 22 February 2011 (UTC)

Law follow up

Speaking of excess material.

'United States Justices John Paul Stevens and Antonin Scalia have since both declared themselves adherents of the Oxfordian Theory, as had Justice Harry Blackmun before them. Justice Lewis Powell, Jr. rejected the Stratford hypothesis without suggesting a candidate. Retired Justice Sandra Day O'Connor followed suit as an anti-Stratfordian, saying "[The author] might well have been someone other than our Stratford man."

It is true that lawyers play a very important role in the Oxfordian argument, replacing as authority figures, Shakespearean-era scholars. It is natural that the Supreme Court moot court decision against be qualified by mentioning that later, two of the original justices were swayed otherwise. But then we have, imperceptibly, mention of the views of Sandra O'Conner, Anthony Scalia, and Lewis F.Powell, none of whom presided at the moot court. The section supposedly dealing with two moot courts, US and English, is made to drift off into a parenthetical excursus on members of the US Supreme Court who entertain anti-Stratfordian views, in a section devoted to 'Authorship revives in the mainstream media.' Worse still the same source tells us Justice Anthony Kennedy and Stephen Breyer are Stratfordians, a fact not mentioned (and I hope it won't be). Are the private opinions of just US Supreme Court Justices on a matter they have no competence in relevant? If so, we will be hauling in before long Nietzsche's support for Bacon, etc.etc.etc., in a prestige by association promotional battle.

This all sets a potentially destabilizing precedent. The mainstream media covered the two events 1987, 1988, and that was the point of writing of these two decisions. The US bit is given undue weight over the English one (to insiders this recalls the fact that the Oxfordian thesis is a minor American media fixation, not shared by the English media). The British moot court decision is never mentioned (except in academic sources) because, unlike the aftermath of the US Supreme Court given some focus here, sources say it was admitted to be a 'disaster' and 'stinging defeat', given the unanimous dismissal rendered by Lords Ackner, Oliver, and Templeton. None of this has been included, wisely. But by the same token, I think the detail on the private opinions of later US supreme court judges is best moved to the Oxfordian Theory page.

There is also the problem that the WSJ ref does not conform to the citation format we are using.Nishidani (talk) 18:08, 20 February 2011 (UTC)

On the immediate point of the Wall Street Journal being an improper source, see the discussion above: fact-checked mainstream periodicals are acceptable sources in Wikipedia. On the matter of reversals of the Justices ruling on the 1987 moot court case, that is factual information. Omitting that the very judges who ruled on the moot court all reversed their Shakespeare vs. Oxford decision, (Brennan expressed doubt about it afterward to his law clerk William F. Causey) is curious to the point of concealment. This pertinent information may strike Nishidani as shockingly out of place. However, I am inclined to think that such a position is pretextual in order to cover another, to keep the facts from being read by interested readers. If the Breyer or Kennedy views support a full disclosure of how the Supreme Court Justices have quite remarkably evolved on the question, it is fine to include it in a sentence or another clause too. In general it is better to be truthful or someone will wonder why you are squirming to avoid being truthful. That the Supreme Court Justices agreed to mock rule on this issue is altogether fitting and proper: it is a case testing the reliability of evidence, and they understand evidence. They rule on evidence in each and every case before them. I'd suggest Nishidani graciously let the undisputed historical facts stand as reported and thereby acknowledge they exist. I do not object to the report that the English judges rejected the Oxfordian position. They had their reasons.Zweigenbaum (talk) 23:34, 20 February 2011 (UTC)

Neither the Wall Street journal nor the New York Times checks the facts in an opinion piece, which is essentially what the USNWR article is. If they had, the statement "Today, those who believe that Shakspere was the author have no definitive proof but instead point to Hamlet's declaration: 'The play's the thing.'" would not have passed muster, much less such a statement as "the weight of evidence anoints de Vere as the leading candidate" or "there isn't a scrap of documentation that Shakspere, the Warwickshire merchant, ever wrote anything in his life." I don't know who Michael Satchell is, but he sounds like he's channelling you and he's certainly not any kind of authority on Shakespeare, not does he meet the sourcing requirements for this article.

And speaking of channelling, it appears that you're now bringing up the exact same points several Oxfordians have tried to argue about in this article. You might want to check the archives from the past year and see how those arguments played out, and you might want to re-read the late arbitration sanctions before resuming your current campaign.

Another trait you seem to have picked up is plopping down a large amount of major material on the main page "for discussion", which was same the modus operandi of another bygone editor. Material for comment is placed on the talk page, not the main page. But also please note that we are not going to have long disruptive discussions that flit from one area to another as can be found in the past 15 archived pages. NPOV collaborative editing involves a bit more than merely saying "thank you" and "please".

On another note, celebrity endorsements are not substantive points of any anti-Stratfordian case, even Oxford's and the purpose of this page is to explain the cases to the reader, not try to influence him or her by drooling over which celebrity has signed on to them. Tom Reedy (talk) 02:11, 21 February 2011 (UTC)

For reasons too obvious to state, I added to the Supreme Court section information that directly pertains to it, namely that two of the three Justices voting AGAINST the Oxford contention in 1987 ENDORSED it later. The third, Brennan, expressed to his former law clerk William F. Causey that he questioned Shakspere's authenticity as the author. The update makes 3-0 against your candidate. But I got that information in the New York Times. These facts, in addition to Lewis Powell, Jr.'s skepticism about Shakspere as author, and Justice O'Connor's recent statement of skepticism to go along with Blackmun, Stevens and Scalia, change the thrust of the paragraph radically. I didn't include every detail I could have for considerations of brevity. If you don't want the relevant facts in your article, have courage and say so. The Supreme Court Justices are hardly "celebrities"; they are world-class specialists in the probity of evidence. That has relevance to this issue, a study in conjecture and little direct evidence. You intended to show that the Oxford case had no probity in your narrative about the moot court decision. The tables turned. They changed their minds. It isn't my fault. I'm not on a contract to do you in. It is fact. Recognize it and we won't have to differ.

On the matter of the major publications not fact-checking on opinion pieces, that was certainly not the case in my experience with the New Yorker. They went through everything like it was a set of legal stipulations. They don't want to make apologies or pay lawyers. The facts have to be right. The opinions are the writers' and they so state.

If I am bringing up points you have previously successfully managed to quash, or their authors, it is likely because the same common-sense questions occur to every reader who encounters the website article as presently constituted. Assuming this little dispute is evidence, you aren't about to let relevant facts get in your way. But that can be a weakness in obtaining a permanent article. I advise against the practice. Zweigenbaum (talk) 08:21, 21 February 2011 (UTC)

The actual "thrust of the paragraph" has nothing to do with who won or lost, but the attendant media coverage about the case and its use as a springboard for publicising Oxfordian ideas among the general public. You want to change a structural point about the history of the authorship question into an opportunity for advocacy, which is evident by your belief that that's the purpose of the paragraph, except for the Stratfordian side. Tom Reedy (talk) 00:38, 22 February 2011 (UTC)

Zweigenbaum, you are now accusing Tom (or is it all of us?) of “quashing” valid points and generally biased editing (for all that you are couching it in superficially polite language). Please don't do that! If you have issues with an edit, comment on the edit and not the editor. You won't effect the changes you want in the article unless you manage to convince the other editors here of their merit; and making this kind of accusation is a singularily inefficient way to go about that.
That being said, your argument, such as it is, is not persuasive: you confuse the moot court with the judges' personal opinions. Granted the whole thing was nothing at all like an actual trial (where there are standards for evidence and expert witnesses), but such as it was they ruled as they did based on (semi-)legal considerations. Whatever they may privately think of the issue is wholly irrelevant, in this case as in every other case, unless it happens to bias their actions in their capacity as judges. You also appear to focus disproportionately on this: the judges opinions are only relevant if your goal is to “inform the reader as to why they should believe the Authorship theory”, but if the goal is “to inform readers about what the Authorship theory is” then their private musings are mere trivia. The article covers the moot court because it was a significant event, as judged by relevant scholarship (i.e. Shapiro), in the development of the Authorship issue, and received popular attention (i.e. it was notable). The judges' private opinions are only relevant as advocacy, and hence do not belong on Wikipedia. --Xover (talk) 10:28, 21 February 2011 (UTC)

Zweigenbaum, you say that these judges are "are world-class specialists in the probity of evidence". No they are not. They are specialists on the probity of evidence according to US law within the US judicial system. That is, they decide how to properly interpret acts of the legislature. They are not judges of what is "good" evidence in some Platonic sense, but of what is admissible in court, is legally relevant, accords with precedent etc, within a particular judicial system. Being experts on US law does not make them competent to judge between different models of Unified Field Theory, or assess the merits of reasons for the Fall of the Roman Empire. They are no more or less competent than anyone else to comment on such matters. Even if we were to discuss their views, we would then be obliged to list judges who have expressed support for the mainstream position. Don't forget that the mainstream won the cases. This would produce an absurd point-counterpoint situation. Paul B (talk) 20:09, 21 February 2011 (UTC)

I see this is a live discussion point and assume the interest is bona fide and not expressions of annoyance that I am interrupted a schedule for submission of the article for permanent adoption. My general position is that minority facts, views, and sourcing are lacking in the Oxford summary, and that applies to this paragraph as well. To reply to Xover's and Dr. Barlow's concerns, you can't have it both ways: when the panel ruled against Oxford as Shakespeare, it was fine and right; but when all the judges withdraw that view upon further thought and more went public on the validity of Stratfordianism, that's irrelevant and must be hidden from view? Blatant double-standards will not serve the credibility of the article. Regarding the now allegedly legislature-ruling only Supreme Court--establishment of fact is mandatory at any level including the Supreme Court Justices. I won my case there by strong presentation of fact. They demanded it as the first threshold hurdle. Now Shakspere doesn't pass that threshold apparently. Mere "Celebrity" endorsements?--their judgments about burden of proof, clear convincing evidence, etc., rank very highly in the legal profession's and public's minds, if not this group's standards. That says something about the changed view of the subject matter at least from the legal perspective. Cramping the moot court sessions and the article referring to them into a sealed bottle called "history", excluding the striking and relevant fact that they who ruled against the Oxfordian argument have since reversed their views, will be seen for what it is, omission, with the resulting doubt about the author's credibility. How can such an obvious blunder happen? Not co-incidentally, there is never acceptable input from the substantial minority position on the question, which is why the ArbCom guideline is there, to see there is minority input. At this point the majority edits don't give an inch in even this most obvious instance of fact-control. Some would term it bias. I don't think the Wikipedia principles support such a position, nor is it wholesome scholarship.

I note no response to my proposal to aim for brevity and salient facts in the Oxford Summary. I will repeat my discussion from the previous section in case some one has not read through those exchanges. The same principles apply. Please note the second half of the ruling - "Where an article concerns a theory that does not have majority support in the relevant scholarly community, the article must fairly describe the division of opinion among those who have extensively studied the matter." That is the mandate for I am trying to do. In fact, the language in the ArbCom clearly says that if something cannot be worked out at talk, then dispute resolution is the way to go. The fact that some of these same things have been recycled on these talk pages, with no resolution, indicates the problems have not been solved, and no consensus established. If you want to challenge every edit I make and every source I add, then maybe the only alternative is to take it to the next level. I hope not. I hope fellow editors see the validity of brevity and concentrating on major points. I see that Peter Farey is doing his best to conform to the various rules you have set for this page, and so am I. But I am also obligated to utilize the rules set by ArbCom. They said that RS is defined as experts on the subject. They did not say that is restricted to mainstream Shakespeare scholars with PhD's. There are experts on the subject that are in no way represented in this article. Price, Ogburn, Anderson, etc., seem to have been banned, even though they are acknowledged experts on the minority views. Even given ArbCom's rulings, I have said to Nishidani, and will say again, that if the information I have added has sources you prefer more, feel free to contribute. I have no objection to your adding your own sources for Meres and Puttenham. That is minor in comparison to what seems to be a systematic attempt to exclude all minority input, even with otherwise acceptable references. Want to source to May? Do so. But I don't believe any other forum has so taken exception to each and every point I have added. I am willing to compromise on which sources we use, as long as the content is accurate and fairly describes the central (as Nishidani termed them) Oxfordian points. At this point, the summary is still littered with far too many minor details. It reads like a caricature of the Oxfordian theory instead of a fair representation. Could we agree on trimming down the second half of the summary? To my eye the brief to the point edit since deleted tells more than the oddball features other editors think-is/prefer-as the Oxfordian theory. If we could agree on the objective of brief but salient, perhaps we can overcome this impasse. Most of the jargon being thrown about to discount my contributions and objections, or to threaten action, associate me with Nina Green, whom I don't know or wish to, etc., all pale in comparison to a simple objective, be fair. There is a minority view and it is not legal to ignore it. Please consider these points.Zweigenbaum (talk) 23:10, 21 February 2011 (UTC)

Ogburn is cited in the references. Diana Price is cited. No one who is in any conceivable way a relevant reliable source has been "banned" from this article. You seem to be under the impression that one of the purposes of this article is to give a non-critical exposition of the Oxfordian position. This is not the case. Since the only thing I can see that you've mentioned specifically in this wall of text is the removal of the personal opinions of a few US Supreme Court Justices, let me explain why they are irrelevant to this discussion (I will be brief - I assume your statement "in the interest of brevity" was not intentionally ironic.) Members of the US Supreme Court are not reliable sources for subjects outside US law. They are experts on what constitutes 'evidence' in trial - this is different from historical evidence. We do not throw historical documents out of consideration for being seized during an illegal search, for example. ArbCom did indeed say that "RS is defined as experts on the subject." This does not means that any expert in any field with an interest in the subject is a RS. The only other concrete suggestion I see you've made is that the Oxford summary should be shortened. Please let us know what you feel is extraneous, that we may discuss it. Kaiguy (talk) 02:14, 22 February 2011 (UTC)

Regarding the Tom Reedy comment about the Supreme Court issue above: towit "The actual "thrust of the paragraph" has nothing to do with who won or lost, but the attendant media coverage about the case and its use as a springboard for publicising Oxfordian ideas among the general public."

I'm afraid the statement indicates a biased viewpoint about what the 1987 moot court case was about. This appears to me to be reflected in the article section itself. That paragraph seems unable to credit that Ogburn thought and moreover successfully conveyed the authorship issue was honorable and worthy, but instead the paragraph infers he floated it as a useful publicity stunt. If so, that was dirty pool. Then how on Earth were the Justices fools enough to go along with him? They too must have felt it was an evidentiary inquiry of importance. Hence it wasn't merely a publicity stunt, except to the writer and to Mr. Reedy above. It was an inquiry to anyone else. To you apparently, there is no possible honor on that side of the issue. As a result, the paragraph is going to and indeed does look like that. The brief addition of the facts concerning the Justices' evolution of thought would give a modicum of neutrality to the discussion of the case(s) and contestants. Lacking that, the present form bears an undercurrent that the devious venture backfired on the Oxfordians. This mars the veracity of the article. History decided in the fullness of time the Supreme Court decision was far from a victory for the Stratford Shakspere contention or a demonstration of cheap publicity. They changed their minds. We don't know that because the relevant facts are omitted. Leaving out facts is never defensible in any moral setting. The article will be much improved telling the whole story. Hence my discussion of it.

In response to Kaiguy's request for what is extraneous in the present Oxford Summary, please refer to the list of reasons regarding a too long, wrongly emphasized Summary in the previous section. There are thirteen points listed. Zweigenbaum (talk) 02:29, 22 February 2011 (UTC)

• Zweigenbaum, what's going on here? You have been topic banned per the discretionary sanctions determined by arbcom in the SAQ case. Bishonen | talk 02:51, 22 February 2011 (UTC).
  • I have noted it here. I assume you have a good excuse. Something better than your note on your talkpage about how you don't think Future Perfect has the right to ban you. Bishonen | talk 02:59, 22 February 2011 (UTC).

As usual, Bishonen, this attempts to silence criticism rather than to reply to it. I have to say that I agree with Zweigenbaum, the paragraph as it stands is sneery, especially in this: "Charlton Ogburn, Jr.... began a campaign to bypass the academic establishment... he learned how to use the media to circumnavigate the academy..." This imputes bad faith and is surely not the way an encyclopedia should be treating anyone, alive or dead. Moonraker2 (talk) 03:32, 22 February 2011 (UTC)

But it must be true Moonraker, because the great man Shapiro himself says so! (Responding to sneering with more sneering). Poujeaux (talk) 13:58, 22 February 2011 (UTC)

Indeed he does. He says that Ogburn gave up on trying to influence academia, concentrating instead on legal cases. In fact Ogburn's recourse to law to try to silence opposition is rather notorious. I'm not sure what "imputes bad faith" means here, but there is no AGF rule about historical events/individuals. Nevertheless, Ogburn no doubt genuinely believed that the academy was biassed and that this was a better means to make the case. Paul B (talk) 14:45, 22 February 2011 (UTC)

Moonraker2 is making accusations from ignorance; it's not something Shapiro made up. He accurately reported Ogburn's own statements about the uselessness of trying to influence academe and the strategy he proposed to bypass it, so anyone who reads it as a sneer has only Ogburn to blame. I would suggest, M2, that you actually read the source material before accusing other editors of bad faith editing. Tom Reedy (talk) 16:32, 22 February 2011 (UTC)

Thank you for the comments. If this ban is supportable (I do not know what it is based on) you have here the gist of the material I have suggested. The debate should not be about me but about an improved article.

Kaiguy, before you asked what I would change or object to, two others had inquired following my initial proposal, so there may be repetitions under those circumstances. People don't always have time to read every word of every post. The points bear repeating if that helps clarification. I wouldn't want to be banned for answering questions more than once however. Here you go with the link: [1] Take care, Zweigenbaum (talk) 04:55, 22 February 2011 (UTC)

Image review 2

As requested, I am looking at all the images in the article and reviewing them as if the article were at FAC.

• File:ShakespeareCandidates1.jpg is a composite of 5 images - I will review each image individually
  • File:Edward de Vere.JPG - this image needs to be sourced. The birth and death dates for the artist and, if known, the date of the artwork should be given, as well as the source (the image file says it was scanned, but not where it was scanned from).
  • File:Francis Bacon, Viscount St Alban from NPG (2).jpg - this image is fine and is a model for others in terms of the information provided.
  • File:Christopher Marlowe.jpg - this is OK, but I would add the image template to make sure the source, date, etc. are formatted in the standrad fashion
  • File:Christopher Marlowe.jpg - this is OK, although it would be nice if the current location of the original image were given (and not just the web page from this version was taken)
  • File:Title page William Shakespeare's First Folio 1623.jpg - fine
• File:William Shakespeares birthplace, Stratford-upon-Avon 26l2007.jpg - fine
• File:Shakespeare sigs collected.png - fine except that I would define "me" is in "scanned by me"
• File:Sonnets1609titlepage.jpg - this is OK, but it seems likely it is taken from another source (since most people do not have a 1609 book to scan), so if it is from online, that link should be given (as is done with File:Title page William Shakespeare's First Folio 1623.jpg)
• File:Poet-ape1616.JPG - this is OK, but it seems likely it is taken from another source (since most people do not have a 1616 book to scan), so if it is from online, that link should be given
• File:Shakespeare-1747-1656.jpg - the most problematic image in the SAQ page. The black and white photo is completely unsourced and the engraving (Kupferstich) while old enough to be PD, needs more information as to source, etc. To me this looks like it was scanned from a book, and thus may well be a copyvio.
  • File:Trinity of Shakespeare at Trinity.jpg looks better, although the photo is not from the same angle. I will look at its three images if you want -

more to come. Ruhrfisch _><>°^° 18:12, 20 February 2011 (UTC)

Thanks Rührfisch! I'm in the middle of a copy-edit and readthrough of the article, so I need to finish that before starting to address the points regarding images that you've so graciously provided. But I'll be looking forward to the rest of your comments, and I just wanted to respond to let you know that it is much appreciated! Incidentally, if you have opinions about the general quality of the images for the purpose of illustrating the prose, or their placement in the article, those would be very helpful too. Please don't put yourself to any extra trouble to address this question, but if you happen to have any thoughts on the subject while you're looking at it anyway then even subjective comments made in passing would be quite helpful for us. In any case, thank you so much for your help with this! --Xover (talk) 23:24, 20 February 2011 (UTC)

It appears to me that File:Edward de Vere.JPG was scanned from the 1975 edition of Looney's "Shakespeare" Identified, as that is the only printed source that I have been able to find. If it's OK, I'll go ahead and add that when I get back home.

The File:Sonnets1609titlepage.jpg was downloaded from the Folger Library site, IIRC, which I will add.

The File:Poet-ape1616.JPG was scanned from either a facsimile edition or downloaded from EEBO. I'll try to find the original file (I usually delete them almost right away) and furnish the information.

File:Shakespeare-1747-1656.jpg is a composite of the Dugdale engraving and what appears to be a scan of Chambers's image. I'll check to see. In any case, it's a head-on photograph of an out-of-copyright artwork. Tom Reedy (talk) 02:26, 21 February 2011 (UTC)

Thanks - these are just the kind of sources and additional information needed. I am not an expert on copyright law, but {{PD-Art}} says in part a mere photograph of an out-of-copyright two-dimensional work may not be protected under American copyright law and this is a photo of a sculpture (three-dimensional art work) so I am not sure that applies. Jappalang is very knoweldgable about copyright law and may be someone to consult here. Ruhrfisch _><>°^° 03:33, 21 February 2011 (UTC)

I'm afraid we do have a problem with the photograph of the statue, if the photograph itself doesn't have a free license. Photographs, even if they show little creative ambition, are presumed copyrighted. And we can't use it under NFC either, because it's evidently replaceable with another free image that could be created. The cleanest way would be to replace this component with a free image (I notice we already have one, and, while I recognize it may be a bit less nice to use because it shows the statue from a different angle, I think it would still be suitable to support the comparison with the old print that's at issue here.) Fut.Perf. ☼ 10:56, 23 February 2011 (UTC)

I've contacted the person who created the composite image to determine where the photograph originated. My understanding is that if the book is out of copyright then the photograph would be usable. Is that correct or am I missing something? The idea that a 400-year-old statue created long before copyright law existed is protected in any way by copyright is nonsensical. If that were true, the Venus de Milo be protected by also. Tom Reedy (talk) 14:22, 23 February 2011 (UTC)

Of course, the statue itself is not protected. The only thing at issue is the copyright on the photography. If the photograph is itself old enough to have fallen into the public domain, then of course we are also okay. Fut.Perf. ☼ 14:37, 23 February 2011 (UTC)

The short version of the issue (and I'm not an expert, but this should suffice for a lay summary) is that in some cases Copyright law recognizes a new copyright to have been created in the photographic reproduction itself, that is entirely separate from the original work. This is the “sweat of the brow” principle: if the photograph has its own artistic merit or required special skills and experience to create, then the photograph itself is an original work for which the photographer holds the copyright. The legal precedent has established that a mere mechanical reproduction of a two-dimensional work of art (i.e. the original is a painting, a drawing, a photo, etc.) does not (normally) qualify for a new copyright; however, any photographic reproduction of a three-dimensial work of art (i.e. the original is a statue, a building, a sculpture, etc.) will potentially create a new copyright for the photographer.
In this specific case, the drawings by Dugdale and Vertue are themselves long out of copyright; and any mere mechanical reproduction of them (tracings, photos, etc.) do not create a new copyright. The funerary monument on the other hand, while itself long out of copyright (essentially predating it, in fact), is a three-dimensional work of art and so any mechanical reproduction of it (i.e. a photo) is likely to create a new copyright vested in the photographer. That's why Tom's photo of the effigy is ok: he holds the copyright to the photo and can license it however he wishes. The photo currently used in the article, on the other hand, is owned by whoever took that photo; and unless the photo itself is either out of copyright (was published before 1923) or has been explicitly licensed under a suitable license, we cannot use it. Even if the license should happen to be correct, or it is out of copyright, we cannot use it unless we can positively verify that this is the case. --Xover (talk) 14:56, 23 February 2011 (UTC)

Well we might be screwed on this one, then. The image was scanned from M. H. Spielmann's Studies in the First Folio: Written for the Shakespeare Association, in celebration of the first Folio tercentenary, and read at meetings of the association held at King's College, University of London, May-June, 1923, published by Oxford UP in 1924. Unless a case can be made that the photo was copyrighted when it was taken earlier for him to use it in his lecture, I'm going to have to find another image to use. I'll work on that today. Tom Reedy (talk) 16:31, 23 February 2011 (UTC)

I've replaced the image with my version while we figure this out. I'm not too unhappy with the result myself, but others must judge whether it is a worthy permanent replacement. IMO, the biggest problem is that we simply don't have a decent head-on image of the monument (the one by Tom that's used here is the best I've found), so it will always be kinda dingy-looking. --Xover (talk) 17:05, 23 February 2011 (UTC)

I've found a pretty good 1904 image. I'll put something together and stick it in. Tom Reedy (talk) 17:50, 23 February 2011 (UTC)

I made a new composite and put it up. IIRC Jack Heller has some good straight-on colour images. I'll ask him if he'll donate one for the cause. Tom Reedy (talk) 18:23, 23 February 2011 (UTC)

All his are at an angle too. Tom Reedy (talk) 18:41, 23 February 2011 (UTC)

Review continued....

• File:Shakespear ye Player coatofarms.gif - fine
• File:King Lear Q1.jpg and File:Camden on Shakespeare.jpg - these are OK, but it seems likely each is taken from another source (since most people do not have a 1605 or 1608 book to scan), so if it is from online, that link should be given
• File:Passionate Pilgrim title page comparison.JPG - again, no doubt that this was published long enough ago that it is PD, but the source(s) for these two images would be good to add, if known.
• File:Shakespeare monument plaque.JPG - since this is two-dimentional and very old, seems clearly PD. Source given too.
• File:Shakespeare's grammar school.JPG - fine, nice documentation
• File:The Two Noble Kinsmen by John Fletcher William Shakespeare 1634.jpg - fine, a model for other images from old books
• File:Delia-Bacon(18811-1859).jpg - I would indicate that the book the image is from was published in 1888 (so clearly PD)
• The images of Bacon, Marlowe and Stanley were part of the composite reviewed above.
• File:Edward-de-Vere-1575.jpg - needs a lot more information and formatting.

I believe that is all of the images. Ruhrfisch _><>°^° 04:35, 21 February 2011 (UTC)

Shakespeare on trial and Other candidates emerge

The sections Shakespeare on trial and Other candidates emerge seem to be rather unbalanced in terms of sheer length (the former is a single paragraph long); and, perhaps more to the point, they seem to be grouped according to different principles: Shakespeare on trial is a thematic grouping where Other candidates emerge is a chronological one. I think we either need to first merge these two sections only to split them into two entirely new sections by some suitable chronological period; or we need to strengthen the Shakespeare on trial section into a thematic one that can stand on its own (which would make it analogous to the top level History and The case for/against…, and hence seems a poor fit to me). My strong preference would be for merging and then splitting rather than retaining a strengthened Shakespeare on trial section.

I've as yet not found a good way to merge + split the two, but barring dissent here I intend to have a go at it as soon as I find some way to attack the problem. Also, if someone who knows the material better than I do would like to have a go at this then that would probably be preferable: I'm simply not sufficiently versed in the topic to see the best temporal categorization here. --Xover (talk) 01:08, 22 February 2011 (UTC)

Xover, I think it would benefit from the editing on someone not all that familiar with the topics, since it's a structural problem, not one of content, so by all means go ahead and let's get this thing wrapped up.

On another topic, it appears that we're right back where we were two months ago. Tom Reedy (talk) 05:22, 22 February 2011 (UTC)

Originally I wrote two thematic sections, since these two elements, unearthing proof, and trial by moot court, were constants in the RS. I still think organizing those parts of the material by theme the best way to sustain the reader's interest through what is a long article, though Xover is right that a certain anomalous tension might be felt in the jar between chronological and thematic treatments. As Tom says, decisions on this are best left to third parties here.Nishidani (talk) 12:16, 22 February 2011 (UTC)

I raised almost the same issue here [2] . I think 'other candidates emerge' is too long. Interesting comment from Tom. I think the best process is a collaboration of experts and nonexperts. I agree with Nishi here, I think a thematic split is more readable than a dull, long chronological list of events. Poujeaux (talk) 13:09, 22 February 2011 (UTC)

I took out the para about WW2. Many things declined in WW2 so it is hardly surprising if Oxfordanism did. Poujeaux (talk) 17:41, 22 February 2011 (UTC)

I don't think that a good (since generic and analogous) reason for the removal, but, we're a community here, so let's see what other editors think of the move.Nishidani (talk) 18:21, 22 February 2011 (UTC)

Poujeaux, please don't unilaterally remove whole paragraphs from the article at this point in the game. That you comment on your removal in this thread suggests that you think there is some discussion of a length issue here. There isn't. The concern discussed here is how we chunk up into sections the material in the article; not how long it is. If you believe there is a general length issue, or that there is some specific part of the article that does not belong for some reason, please make a case for those specific changes. --Xover (talk) 18:54, 22 February 2011 (UTC)

Poujeaux's statement "Many things declined in WW2 so it is hardly surprising if Oxfordanism did." is one of the most bizarre statements I can remember reading on Wikipedia. Many things declined. Many things rose. The power of Germany and Japan rose and then declined. Pimpernel Smith challenged the Nazis with Oxfordian arguments, but I really doubt it was a major concern during the war. Still, this just shows that the sentence "Oxfordism and anti-Stratfordism declined in popularity and visibility during World War II" is itself problematic. The war is a watershed event in the 20th century. It's used as a signpost for cultural change, justs as decades and regimes are, but we should not suggest that the war was responsible for change. Paul B (talk) 19:49, 22 February 2011 (UTC)

I can see how both grafs could be combined into one, but I don't think it would appreciably reduce the text enough to bother with it. We don't want an article so condensed that it has to be unpacked like a poem explication to appreciate the full meanings. The eye needs to breath and take in information at a more leisurely pace but without dawdling, and I think we're very close to optimal on that score. Tom Reedy (talk) 05:44, 23 February 2011 (UTC)

Well I think there are several problems with that para. As well as Paul B's point, there is "Copious archival research had failed to turn up the expected confirmation..." - expected? By who? And the last sentence "..claiming to find myriad hidden clues.." is another example of the sneery biased opinionated style. Xover, it has already been discussed that this sec is too long, because it has a main article that's hardly any longer. In fact you yourself commented on 'main article' sections here [3]Poujeaux (talk) 09:21, 23 February 2011 (UTC)

Claimed by who? By various Baconians and Oxfordians, that's who. I don't think we need to list them by name. This is well documented in Shapiro and other sources. They were looking for manuscripts and letters mainly. Proponents of Baconism regularly claimed to find coded messages hidden in Shakespeare's works. This was not initially a part of the Oxfordian argument. More recently it has become characteristic of Oxfordians. I don't think the facts are in dispute, but if you think the language is "sneery" change the tone. Paul B (talk) 09:36, 23 February 2011 (UTC)

I think merely removing the adjectives would address P's concerns. For some reason the use of sibilants seems to convey contempt. The adjective "assiduously" was objected to for much the same reason when it was used in the lede to describe the efforts of anti-Stratfordians to promote their theories, and I believe that bias has expanded so that the use of almost any seldom-used word is considered to be a mark of intellectual elitism. Tom Reedy (talk) 13:34, 23 February 2011 (UTC)

Blame is starting to be whispered abroad about using descriptive language that is echoed throughout sources. We are supposed to write neutrally but not so flatly that readers get sleepweary after two sentences. The objections are beginning to look nugatory, or negligible. Familiarity with the vast outpourings (myriad: 5000 items just down to 1949), or with Looney, who lead his disciples to expect results from archival foragings. What's sneering about saying clues are hidden? And opinionated is a bizarre word to describe prose that has striven to get into neutral language what RS authorities unanimously aver. Nishidani (talk) 14:24, 23 February 2011 (UTC)

The adjectives I was referring to were "copious" and "myriad". If you look in the archives, "assiduously" was objected to as POV in much the same manner, as were other descriptive terms. I don't understand it myself, because the descriptions were accurate (anti-Stratfordians certainly work assiduously to promote their candidates), but then again most of the objections have come from those who shy away from bald, reality-based description in favour of softer, more euphemistic language. It goes back to the differences between scholarly and promotional, IMO. Tom Reedy (talk) 16:26, 23 February 2011 (UTC)

Oh, rodents! And there I was just fiddling with the idea of finishing my annotations to Lycophron's Alexandra, which must have the greatest number of hapax legomena in any poem of the Western bazooka.Nishidani (talk) 14:09, 23 February 2011 (UTC)

Ok, I've fiddled around a bit with this. The Shakespeare on trial bit is now the middle paragraph of the preceding section (Searching for proof), where I think it fits reasonably well both chronologically and thematically. I've also merged the first two subsections of the History of the authorship question section into a new subsection called Rise of bardolatry and precursors of doubt. The two were each very short and they were thematically sufficiently close that they fit well together. And finally I've merged some of the short paragraphs in the Other candidates emerge section. This section doesn't feel quite so unbalanced (length-wise) when the surrounding sections have been merged into more comparable lengths, and making it more compact alleviated this even further. Merging the paras also softened the listyness of the section quite a bit, to the point I think it is now acceptable. I've tried to copy-edit out any awkward segways resulting from this, but it would probably be a good idea for someone else to have a look and try to smooth any remaining jagged edges. --Xover (talk) 21:23, 23 February 2011 (UTC)

Thanks to Nikkimaria for making the wording there more NPOV and less sneery! Poujeaux (talk) 14:03, 25 February 2011 (UTC)

Derby section

I think this section is a bit of a rag-bag. I'd suggest that the bit on Honigmann should go. He's not a Debyite and in any case the claim dates at least as far back as Lefranc's 1919 book Sous the masque... (possibly further). Do we need the assertion that Derby appears in group theories? So do they all - sometimes. A. J. Evans accorded him the chief role, but I don't think it's a widespread view beyond his book. The whole section seems choppy. Paul B (talk) 13:18, 22 February 2011 (UTC)

Paul,the Derby Wedding thesis was first advanced by Sir Sydney Lee in the mid-1890's. Lefranc clearly acknowledged this. How often do you ever read the authors, or materials, on which you profess to be commenting here? This section and the Lefranc biography would seem less of a rag bag if you did.Neil Hayman (talk) 23:48, 22 February 2011 (UTC)

Well Charles, sorry, Neil, do you ever read the authors you comment on? The words were, "in any case the claim dates at least as far back as Lefranc's 1919 book Sous the masque... (possibly further)." I referred to the earliest reference I knew of off the top of my head: the relevant facts being that it is a heck of a lot earlier than Honigmann, and it is from a Derbyite, which were the points at issue. If you can improve the section or the Lefranc biography please do. You know, you do bear a remarkable resemblance to Sydney Carton. Paul B (talk) 08:23, 23 February 2011 (UTC)

Good ear, Paul. Tom Reedy (talk) 22:03, 23 February 2011 (UTC)

Wider input on idiom required

Xover, myself and Alan have been discussing on my page the comparative merits of 'came to be regarded as' vs. 'become regarded as' in the text. Could readers (I note the page has suffered an extraordinary bounce from 40 to 140 over the last few weeks?) tell us which of the two they would prefer in the text?Nishidani (talk) 00:05, 23 February 2011 (UTC)

I edited the sentence in question to read "The authorship question emerged only after Shakespeare became regarded as the English national poet and a unique genius in a class by himself", which uses neither construction (however grammatical they may be), easier to understand, and (IMO) doesn't throw the reader off with an awkward-sounding construction. Tom Reedy (talk) 02:58, 23 February 2011 (UTC)

Tom I agree that your edit has improved the sentence. But you are sidestepping the question: Is "became regarded" or "came to be regarded" more idiomatic English? To Nishidani and myself, "came to be regarded" sounds more natural. To Xover, "became regarded" is better. May I infer from your response that "became regarded" is fine, and we should just let it be? Maybe we're nitpicking here, and I can understand your impatience for us to just get through this thing and prepare the article for FA nomination. For my part, I have been meaning to do at least one more complete read-through, but I have put it off, as the article seems to have lost some stability in the last few days. Once I am assured that things have settled down, I'll do the read-through, if only to provide yet another pair of eyes and possibly make some additional minor contribution to the process. --Alan W (talk) 03:31, 23 February 2011 (UTC)

I don't see any difference in meaning between the two constructions, so to me the simplest is best and to my mind more idiomatic. Try substituting another verb for "regarded": "Bill wasn't cold until he became naked" vs. "Bill wasn't cold until he came to be naked". Both are technically correct, but the first is certainly an improvement and conforms to Rule No. 14 of good writing: "eschew surplusage". Tom Reedy (talk) 03:40, 23 February 2011 (UTC)

Fine, then you cast your vote with Xover. Fair enough. We're evenly divided (unless someone else cares to cast a vote). I would still maintain that in not substituting another verb or abstracting the phrase from its broader context, one might feel that "came to be regarded" lends some helpful overtones that "became regarded" does not. But that is perhaps straying too far into subjectivity. Enough with these quibbles, and back to improving the article as a whole! --Alan W (talk) 05:26, 23 February 2011 (UTC)

I vote for 'came to be regarded'. Poujeaux (talk) 08:54, 23 February 2011 (UTC)

Thanks, Poujeaux. Now "came to be regarded" has taken the lead. Nishidani has posted on his talk page a justification of this phrase from a very different perspective, as well. I suggest that we let this simmer for a while, but then maybe a bit later on we will be inclined to restore this phrasing. Last night I began my promised read-through of the entire page and made a couple of minor edits. I will continue as I find the time. This I consider my highest priority right now (at least on this article). --Alan W (talk) 04:25, 24 February 2011 (UTC)

As I think I've mentioned elsewhere, I am not particularly invested in which variant is employed here. I believe they are both correct, as such, so whichever is preferred, on whatever grounds, can be used. --Xover (talk) 15:23, 24 February 2011 (UTC)

"Became regarded" sounds awkward to me, but keep in mind a) this may just be an issue of different dialects, and b) I'm certainly no one to talk about awkward phrasing. Kaiguy (talk) 06:37, 26 February 2011 (UTC)

On the contrary, Kaiguy, edits like this show your solid grasp of idiomatic English, and I wish you had contributed more; no need to be so self-deprecating! Nor is it a manner of dialect here. Nishidani is clearly British and I am American, and we agree on "came to be regarded". (Poujeaux "lives in the UK", so I assume he is British as well.) Similarly, supporters of "became regarded" very possibly grew up speaking different dialects of English. --Alan W (talk) 16:53, 26 February 2011 (UTC)

Out of curiosity (because I don't care which phrase is used), what is it about the addition of the infinitive that makes it less awkward? To my mind "became" and "came to be" make exactly the same statement. I don't remember where I picked it up, but I try to get rid of cut as many prepositions, adverbs, adjectives, and infinitives as possible without destroying the sense. Tom Reedy (talk) 17:35, 26 February 2011 (UTC)

Clearly this is not our most pressing issue. If "became regarded" ends up gathering more votes after all, I won't lose sleep over it myself. To answer your question (and just, of course, speaking for myself; Nishidani presents his thoughts in detail on his talk page), to me, "became regarded" suggests a rapid transformation; "came to be regarded" suggests a slower, evolutionary change from perhaps complex or unobvious causes. I do not deny the subjectivity in this, and I am glad Nishidani posted the question here, to see how others feel—in this case "feel" is very much the operative word. Xover makes some interesting points on Nish's page, too, in his arguing against "came to be" that have nothing to do with conciseness. I agree with you in principle that, all other things being equal, concise is better. To me, and evidently to some others, however, the two expressions are not exactly synonymous. --Alan W (talk) 03:49, 27 February 2011 (UTC)

Agree with the above. And "became regarded" sounds awkward to me (maybe it is a Brit/US thing). --GuillaumeTell 11:56, 27 February 2011 (UTC)

It's natural for two editors with finely tuned antennae for linguistic nuance, and therefore I well expect that some phrase like William James' about a 'mind debauched by learning' for making 'the natural seem strange' (Psychology. Briefer Course, 1920 p.394) would be a fair crack of the whip if they dissent on reading the following!

(a) 'Shakespeare became regarded as the English national poet'.

subject+(verb) become+ past participle

(b)'Shakespeare came to be regarded as. . .'

subject+ (verb)come + infinitive+past participle = passive voice

I said the former was context restricted earlier. The rule-by-thumb in cases like this is to generate similar examples with the same structure, and see how they work.

For (a) we would have

• With fermentation, soya became prepared as an edible food.
• Stratford became visited as the hometown of Shakespeare.
• Potatoes became eaten as the Irish national food.
• commoners' shoes became polished as a sign of rising domestic respect for gentlemen's fashion.
• The Beijing dialect became spoken as the default form of Chinese for natives speaking mutually unintellible languages.
• The Vatican became built as a cynosure for Christendom's faithful.
• Vergil's 4th Eclogue became read as a premonition of Christianity's birth.
• gunboats became sent as a measure of British imperial power's global outreach.
• yachts became sailed as a token of conspicuous wealth.
• whales became killed as a quintessential assertion of Japan's cultural rights over certain forms of endangered species.
• The Moorish chiefs became beheaded as an encouragement of others.
• The helots became murdered as proof of a youth's attainment of Spartan manhood.
• beer became drunk(en) as as a palliative to the high-salt content of preserved foods in northern Europe.

It is a curiosity of language that, once we repeat and vary an idiomatic structure in our native tongue, it looses its initial strangeness as use domesticates it. Some of the above may read as quite acceptable. Quite a few of them will appear problematical. 'became polished' (Oh really, I thought they were rather rough and uncouth), 'became sent', 'became sailed' ('yachts always have sails,' a peruser would murmur in pausing over the phrase'), 'became beheaded', 'became murdered', 'became drunk' (intoxicated beer!) etc., being the most conspicuous.

The point is 'become+past participle' has a restricted use, whereas 'come+to be+past participle' functions in most contexts because the 'infinitive+ past participle' is equivalent to the stand passive form of any active verb. The as following plays some role in this as well, not to speak of considerations over the difference between past participles which retain their verbal implication and those which have lost them on the way to adjectivalization. If you insert as substitutes the 'come+to be+pp.' in any of the dubious examples I have thought up randomly, then the slight or marked oddness of the other form is lost and they make, thus adjusted, immediate and unambiguous sense.

That said, 'become regarded as' in now ineludibly a part of my by now expanded natural English syntax, for which I owe a debt of thanks to Tom and Xover.Nishidani (talk) 17:47, 27 February 2011 (UTC)

A tour de force of linguistic analysis, Nishidani! --Alan W (talk) 23:43, 27 February 2011 (UTC)

Non sequitur?

This sentence seems to me to lack context in the Missing documentary evidence section: "Regarding the lack of evidence surrounding Shakespeare, Professor Hugh Trevor-Roper wrote in 1962: 'During his lifetime nobody claimed to know him. Not a single tribute was paid to him at his death. As far as the records go, he was uneducated, had no literary friends, possessed at his death no books, and could not write.'[57]"

I don't remember when or why it was added, but as it stands it doesn't make much sense. Tom Reedy (talk) 05:51, 23 February 2011 (UTC)

If memory serves, that was one of Smatprt's additions way-back-when. It's a way of shoring up the case by quoting from authority figures: "look, a famous historian agrees with us"! It's just cut-and-pasted from an Oxfordian website [4], though Trevor-Roper seems to be hinting coyly at a Baconian POV in the essay. Paul B (talk) 08:31, 23 February 2011 (UTC)

I do not know when the original was entered, but Smatprt did several edits with pieces from Trevor-Roper in January 2010, although the current text did not appear at that time. An edit on 10:28, 6 February 2011 by Moonraker2 diff added the current quotation with edit summary "Missing documentary evidence: restored Trevor-Roper quotation". Johnuniq (talk) 08:56, 23 February 2011 (UTC)

Well we need to either figure out away to work it in (and change the sourcing to a WP:RS), or delete it. Tom Reedy (talk) 18:46, 23 February 2011 (UTC)

Ah, I recall finding it sufficiently malapropos when it was added that I made a note to have a closer look at it once other things calmed down a bit. On the one hand it looks like fairly obvious advocacy—an Oxfordian who desperately wants to find a way to make the article say “There's no evidence for Shakespeare”—and as such it can be summarily deleted. However, it does (involuntarily I'm sure) actually fit perfectly in that section: we're talking about how Anti-Stratfordians dismiss all the contemporary references and evidence, and then here actually comes an Oxfordian demonstrating that very behaviour. I suspect it can be incorporated quite easily as an example of the very thing the section is discussing. --Xover (talk) 19:35, 23 February 2011 (UTC)

That's fine, but

(1) The source is not reliable as far as Wikipedia goes.

(2) Trevor-Roper wasn't an Oxfordian or even an anti-Stratfordian, and

(3) if you read his entire essay you can see it's mischaracterised by taking a few sentences out of context. The essay is much more nuanced than it is made out to be.

Its use really is only a demonstration of how Oxfordians abuse the evidence. Unless we can find a WP:RS source that says something like, "Anti-Strats often distort and quote out of context to support their theories, such as in this example from Trevor-Howard", it needs to just be deleted. Tom Reedy (talk) 20:03, 23 February 2011 (UTC)

Yeah, I was just about to post “I take it back.” The cited Trevor-Roper piece only laments the lack of evidence as it pertains to deeper insight into the man, and spends the rest of it doing fairly standard analysis and reasoning from internal evidence (and he's even fairly carful about it, unlike some others I've had the misfortune to read). He is explicitly not making any kind of connection between any missing evidence and the identity of Shakespeare, and as such it is actually entirely misplaced in the section. At best, as you say, the fact that anti-Stratfordians cite it could be used as an example of their methods of evidence; but Trevor-Roper himself should be neither cited nor given as an example here. --Xover (talk) 20:15, 23 February 2011 (UTC)

And I've now removed the quote entirely. --Xover (talk) 20:20, 23 February 2011 (UTC)

Wording issues

Some recent edits to the Other candidates emerge section may need some attention (I am comparing the current text with that at 05:52, 23 February 2011).

• The section now starts "Towards the turn of the century...". We can't assume the reader understands which century. Perhaps "In the late 1800s...", or "In the 1890s..."?

On examination the phrase seems necessary, (unless we substitute 'By the turn of the century' which would cope with Ziegler (1895) and Bleibtreu (1907). think we should expect readers, even in this dour days, (Alan Bloom 1987) to understand contextually which century is being referred to. Nishidani (talk) 12:42, 24 February 2011 (UTC)

• Why start the following with "And": "And after World War I..."?

Why indeed. I've removed it.Nishidani (talk) 12:42, 24 February 2011 (UTC)

• The text "Yet another candidate..." was just "Another candidate...". The "Yet" is of course accurate, but it seems an unnecessary NPOV problem.

A bit 'nice' but nice distinctions are what we all love. I've tried to emend in order to expunge any perceived hint of NPOV problems.Nishidani (talk) 12:42, 24 February 2011 (UTC)

• The sentence starting "But in the period after World War II..." seems unconnected with the preceeding text (the sentence was previously a new paragraph). Also, starting with "But" is a problem?

I've butted 'but'.Nishidani (talk) 12:42, 24 February 2011 (UTC)

• The sentence starting "In 1913 John M. Robertson..." was in the earlier version, but the sentence reads oddly to me. Given the section, it should be about another candidate, but it seems to be just a refutation of an anti-strat argument. Since the argument (that the author would have to be a legal expert) is not in the section, I think the refutation should be removed.

I am not sufficiently confident of my opinions to edit these myself, and am hoping someone might comment or do some tweaking. Johnuniq (talk) 02:53, 24 February 2011 (UTC)

Valid points, but I would retain Robertson, whose work Vickers, writing almost a century later, judged to be the best study of the (Baconian) 'delusion', and therefore merits mention in this historical section. You certainly do have a point regarding the flow of the paragraph, whose subject concerns the drift away from Baconism. I think the problematical sentence, in this context, is not so much the one dealing with Robertson, as with Twain. We have Bleitreu suggesting one candidate, Greenwood dismissing Shakespeare but withholding judgement on who the 'real author' might have been. Then, almost as an aside Twain is mentioned, because he is influenced by Greenwood, yet favoured Bacon (the author whose decline as a candidate is being analysed here). So Twain is going against the tide described. He's only on the page because of his promotional value is so highly regarded in the anti-Stratfordian literature. This is how i'd try to iron out the slight jarring of themes in the sequence of sentences.

Unaffiliated anti-Stratfordians also began to appear. The German literary critic Karl Bleibtreu supported the nomination of Roger Manners, 5th Earl of Rutland in 1907.[147] British barrister George Greenwood, whose work influenced Mark Twain's own anti-Stratfordian beliefs,[148] sought to disqualify William Shakespeare in his The Shakespeare Problem Restated (1908). Greenwood, unlike Twain, who still favoured Bacon,[149] withheld support for any alternative authors, thereby sanctioning the search for candidates other than Bacon and setting the stage for the rise of candidates such as Marlowe, Stanley, Manners, and Oxford.[150). In 1913, John M. Robertson in his The Baconian Heresy: A Confutation, disposed of the key Baconian contention that Shakespeare must have had expert legal knowledge by showing that legalisms pervaded Elizabethan and Jacobean literature.[151]

Nishidani (talk) 12:15, 24 February 2011 (UTC)

• The time period is, I think, reasonably clear from context (it continues from the previous paragraph, and is almost a strict chronological progression), but can in a pinch be fixed by simply naming which century.
• “And”, “Yet”, and “But” are connecting words, that I otherwise agree should never start a sentence unless absolutely necessary, that are here used to try to soften the listyness of this section. This was always a problem but became more glaring when I merged the separate single-sentence paragraphs into larger paragraphs, and the connecting words were a first approximation to softening this (see also next bullet).
• The sentences that appear disconnected (including the NPOV problems you read into them) are a result of the listyness. The thread connecting the section is the various publications and events that occurred in this time period that were significant to the Authorship question; but this thread is never made explicit—the framing narrative is missing—resulting in a section that is effectively a list without the actual bullet points. Thus, what you perceive as a refutation of an anti-Strat argument is actually just us making note that Robertson published a book pertaining to Authorship (that just happened to be one that refuted it rather than supported it). It is entirely apropos both thematically and chronologically, but the problems with the prose makes it appear malapropos.
• Unrelated to any specific point you make, I take the impression that recent events have perhaps made us overly sensitive to perceived NPOV problems in the text. The previous bullet marks one such instance, and the noted “Yet” is equally apposite: there is no inherent value judgement in the word “yet”, it merely speaks to quantity, and it is an objective fact that the quantity of proposed candidates and theories was a) greatly increasing (which point we make in this section), and b) already rather large in absolute terms. It is a perfectly valid and value-neutral formulation to use here. Starting the sentence with “Yet” has, of course, other problems (related to prose quality); but being non-NPOV is not one. --Xover (talk) 15:20, 24 February 2011 (UTC)

It is perfectly acceptable to begin sentences with conjunctions if it is called for. Not having looked at the points above I can't say if they are OK, but objecting to them purely on stylistic grounds is insufficient. Tom Reedy (talk) 16:25, 24 February 2011 (UTC)

Contested Will

I raised this before (see archive 22), but I don't think the issue was resolved. The article contains this para:

In 2010 James Shapiro surveyed the authorship question in Contested Will: Who Wrote Shakespeare?, marking the first time a recognized Shakespeare scholar devoted a book to the topic. He approached the subject from a sociological standpoint and found its origins firmly rooted in traditional scholarship going back to Edmund Malone, and he criticised academe for ignoring the topic and effectively surrendering the field to anti-Stratfordians.

I know that name variations occur, but the article is Edmond Malone and we should use that spelling.

The main problem is that the meaning of the last sentence is unclear. What is a "sociological standpoint"? The "firmly rooted" can be read as saying that anti-Stratfordian arguments are valid because they are based on traditional scholarship. Readers should not be expected to know that "traditional" is here used to mean "bad". Johnuniq (talk) 03:08, 24 February 2011 (UTC)

Perhaps we should use the term historicist instead of sociological. His point is that anti-Stratfordism is a product of its historical time.

I don't understand why you say "firmly rooted" = valid, but we can change that to "its origins are based in the same methods used by early Shakespeare scholars that have since been superseded by more valid methodology" or something along that line. Tom Reedy (talk) 03:19, 24 February 2011 (UTC)

We talk about the 'sociology of knowledge', how social circumstance inflects perceptions of what we (think we) know. Really, what Shapiro is doing is what is now generically spoken of as 'cultural history' (I'm just reading Stephen Kern's A Cultural History of Causality, which has a similar approach), but it would be awkward to write, since we are not writing the German article (vom geistesgeschichtlichen Standpunkt!!), 'from a cultural-historical standpoint'.Nishidani (talk) 13:39, 24 February 2011 (UTC)

I too felt unhappy about "firmly rooted". It does seem to imply something like "solidly based" , as if Shapiro has discovered that there is a firm basis for A-S arguments. How about "evolved from"? Paul B (talk) 12:01, 24 February 2011 (UTC)

I've had a shot ('tantamount to' could be deleted, leaving just 'surrendering' to be adjusted to 'surrendered'.

What about 'including creating several articles on Wikipedia'. The kissing echo of those two 'ings' worries my ear, but don't wig me if this strikes you all as wankishly finicky.Nishidani (talk) 13:00, 24 February 2011 (UTC)

"broached by a vein" is too indirect and diffusive. Tom Reedy (talk) 13:49, 24 February 2011 (UTC)

With the caveat that I haven't finished Contested Will yet, what I've assumed this paragraph to refer to is the first chapter (ish) of the book. Here Shapiro rakes Malone over the coals for being the first to read autobiography into the works, particularly in his note on Sonnet 93 IIRC, and thereby legitimizing all the following attempts to do so. Since the various Authorship theorists tend to do this to an extreme degree (where mainstream scholars commit the same sin to a lesser degree), that aspect of the Authorship question can be said to more or less directly stem from Malone. In addition, of course, Shapiro takes pains to say that he's not so interested in the various specific arguments and bits of evidence presented—that is, he's not so engaged in what they believe—but rather he's interested in why they believe what they do; which is what I think all the “sociological standpoint”, “cultural-historical”, and “sociology of knowledge” phrases are trying to say. --Xover (talk) 14:57, 24 February 2011 (UTC)

he's interested in why they believe what they do

Exactly, and the article should say that. I had hoped that some wording from a review of the book, or an interview with Shapiro, could be used to clarify what is meant (the review/interview being a reference) but I can't locate anything particularly helpful. Recent changes have improved the text, and if others are happy, then it's ok by me. Johnuniq (talk) 23:19, 24 February 2011 (UTC)

Time to stop churning?

I'm of the opinion that we're to the point that we're finding problems that were caused by fixing problems we found earlier that originated in fixing problems found previously. IOW, we're churning things that probably aren't even mildly important, much less critical.

I've just now been able to devote some time to the page, and to my mind the only semi-major point that needs to be addressed is the Oxford section. Several objections were brought up during the arbitration that I think deserve consideration. I think we should fix that and then stand back and let the FAC reviewers tell us what needs to be done. I'll post some suggestions later today for discussion. Tom Reedy (talk) 16:22, 24 February 2011 (UTC)

I'd just wait till Alan, Xover and Johnuniq finish their rereadings - they seem to be almost through - and ask them (I've also dropped a note on Hamiltonstone's pge, but he is on wikibreak) if they think we're all ready. I still think Johnuniq had a strong point on the slight dyscrasia caused by introducing the pro-Baconian Twain, in a section dealing with the emergent disavowals of Bacon, but won't harp on it unless others think something along the line readjustments I suggested is worth the several seconds' effort to perform. Otherwise, I pretty much agree. For an article of this length it looks fairly good to me. But then, I know eff-all about what degree of pertinacious meticulousness FA pages and editors require. Nishidani (talk) 16:55, 24 February 2011 (UTC)

I have only the candidate sections left to go through, and those are unlikely to ever be “perfect” until their respective Main articles are FA-quality. Of the previous issues brought up there's whatever is left to do with the images (I haven't checked whether you fixed all of them yet?); and finally there's the External links section that I plan to assault with vigor once I'm through the candidate sections. Other than that I'd say we're pretty much ready to go to FAC (you're absolutely right, we're in imminent danger of turning our Crème Chantilly into butter). If John and Alan are doing their final readthroughs now we should probably aim for this weekend (or however long they take to finish) and, barring anything major cropping up, just take the plunge.
As for the FAC reviewers, you can pretty much assume that whatever level of obsessive meticulousness the article has achieved, they will require one step further. Their perspective when reviewing the article will, quite appropriately, be to shine a spotlight on every single flaw they can find (in order to make it as good as it can get): I'd be far more worried that we fail to catch the interest of reviewers (no reviews = no consensus for FA) than that they will find fault with it (loads of review comments just means there's loads of nice easy todo-list items for us to address i order to reach FA). My one concern is that we haven't had a master like Qp10qp or Awadewit copy-edit the article; those two can untangle the thorniest patches of prose, and we have some briars in there that could easily be too rough fare for the tender palates at FAC. --Xover (talk) 17:40, 24 February 2011 (UTC)

Awadewit is too busy and I haven't even thought about asking Qp. I'll see if he can take a look. Tom Reedy (talk) 17:55, 24 February 2011 (UTC)

And it appears he's busy doing other things also. Tom Reedy (talk) 18:06, 24 February 2011 (UTC)

Yeah, and I think we're generally ok, so I'm not going to fret about it. The only reason I worry about it is that the one problem that's a real bitch to discover while at FAC is copy-editing (because it's damnably hard, and finding a good copy-editor takes more time than FAC usually affords). --Xover (talk) 18:19, 24 February 2011 (UTC)

Ammappa'oh, che jella! My innate pessimism about all this (I imagine a chorus of cherubic cheers from the darker wings of wikipedia's twilight zone if it fails), conjoined to Spanish-Joycean eyes, read todo-list as a list to (re) do everything! Nishidani (talk) 18:57, 24 February 2011 (UTC)

We could try Roger Davies. Wrad (talk) 20:44, 24 February 2011 (UTC)

I have finished. When the others are done, we need a period of at least a week where almost no changes occur before going to FAC. I noticed one point that someone might want to fix: the article has one "front-man", one "frontman", and three "front". Perhaps make all just "front"? Johnuniq (talk) 00:10, 25 February 2011 (UTC)

Thanks indeed, Johnuniq. Yes, there is an incongruency there. I'd long thought that a little variation on these terms might be useful, using, for example, a 'blind' ('Any thing or action intended to conceal one's real design' (O.E.D. (1989) vol.2 p.288 column one, 6.) 'Front' alone is fine (referring to the person, not an action or thing'), and is used twice. 'Frontman/front-man, front man'. The O.E.D. notes (vol.VI (1989) pp.214 (col.2)-215 col.2) that it is a US idiom (and indeed, paradoxically, in its list of example, only gives one example of 'front-man' from the British Spectator), but registers it without hyphenation. I have adopted this unhyphenated form on their authority, but language is slippery, and perhaps conventions have changed since then.Nishidani (talk) 11:53, 25 February 2011 (UTC)

I am well along in my reading, which has thus far resulted in a miscellany of edits, mostly fairly minor, but has turned up nothing that really alarmed me. A couple of things for consideration here while I plod along through the rest:

The section titled "Rise of bardolatry and precursors of doubt"—when I first noticed this merged header, my impression was that it was about the rise of bardolatry and the rise of precursors of doubt. If no one else is made the least bit uneasy by this (and I'm not claiming it's bad in any serious way), then, well, never mind! I don't mean to make too much of it.

In the Overview: "They attempt to disqualify William Shakespeare as the author due to perceived inadequacies in his background, and they offer supporting arguments for a substitute candidate and postulate some type of conspiracy to protect the author's true identity.[20] The latter is also used to explain why no documentary evidence exists for their particular candidate and why the historical record confirms Shakespeare's authorship.[21]" I'm not happy with these sentences. "They attempt...due to" is founded on marginal grammar and to me sounds very awkward. The second clause crams a bit much into the sentence. (Come to think of it, it's two clauses, with an implicit "they".) And the next sentence begins: "The latter is also..." The latter what? Probably should be "last" whatever, anyway, since there are more than two—claims? arguments? postulations? explanations?—in the previous sentence. I'll tackle restructuring this if no one else volunteers. I just didn't try it yet as I'm not quite sure how, and, also, the Overview is a very prominent part of the article and thus a sensitive area. --Alan W (talk) 01:34, 25 February 2011 (UTC)

I've had a dash at it, though it may not be 'sausage-factory'. Fixing burst water-pipes in chill weather is not conducive, unlike standing one's turn at the tumbril, to concentrating one's mind on things like the niceties of English usage.Nishidani (talk) 15:18, 25 February 2011 (UTC)

Maybe repairing broken English sentences is closer than you think to repairing broken water pipes, Nishidani. Be that as it may, I'd say you've fixed the problems. Thank you! --Alan W (talk) 05:36, 26 February 2011 (UTC)

I've done all I can for now (I did make a complete pass through of the article, though toward the end I was fuzzy-headed enough to have probably overlooked things I otherwise might not have). I do hope my questions, including the one I just posed in the section below, will be addressed; otherwise, I think we might be ready for the next major step. Overall, it's really quite good, I'd say. --Alan W (talk) 05:40, 25 February 2011 (UTC)

As to "front", "front man", and "front-man": "Front man" with or without the hyphen to me means the guy who sings in a rock band. I think "front" should suffice. Tom Reedy (talk) 18:04, 25 February 2011 (UTC)

Ciphers

A very active evening on the SAQ page in the Western Hemisphere. Nikkimaria and I have been busy at the same time, as I first discovered when I found that an edit I was just thinking of making was done, as if by magic, by the time I clicked "Edit".

Many truly excellent edits, Nikkimaria! There is one point, however, on which we disagree, as I found when you silently reverted an edit I had just made. I think this is sufficiently important that it should be brought up here, where those who have been immersed in this material for years can best judge which way is better.

In "Search for Proof", before this evening (when it was "Searching for Proof", but I'm not disputing that change), this is how this sentence read:

Ciphers became important to the theory, with thick books such as Ignatius L. Donnelly's The Great Cryptogram (1888) promoting the approach.

Nikkimaria edited this to:

Ciphers became important to the alternate-authorship theories, with thick books such as Ignatius L. Donnelly's The Great Cryptogram (1888) promoting the approach.

This does not seem right in this context. We are reading the history. At this point, only Francis Bacon has been proposed as an alternate-authorship candidate. Donnelly's book was only about ciphers linked to Bacon's life. True, as I understand it, ciphers were at least to an extent brought in to justify other candidates. But not by Donnelly, and not until years later. So I edited this to:

Ciphers became important to the Baconian theory, with thick books such as Ignatius L. Donnelly's The Great Cryptogram (1888) promoting the approach.

A bit later, I noticed that Nikkimaria had changed this back to:

Ciphers became important to the alternate-authorship theories, with thick books such as Ignatius L. Donnelly's The Great Cryptogram (1888) promoting the approach.

I do not think that this statement should be made this way at this point in the narrative. As I, however, am far from an expert on the subject matter, I appeal to those among us who are (or at least know more about it than I do): which way is better here? Or should yet other wording be substituted? --Alan W (talk) 05:31, 25 February 2011 (UTC)

Ah, I suspect this may have been unintentional. Nikkimaria was copy-editing the whole article, which makes edit-conflicts both inevitable and very hard to resolve. I noticed a few instances of Nikkimaria changing back exactly to the previous wording, where you'd recently made a change; and that looks a lot like just the edits clashing than actual disagreement over the wording. IOW, I suspect these were by accident. --Xover (talk) 10:08, 25 February 2011 (UTC)

Alan has a point - at this time there is only Bacon as major writer (but many other writers were named in the 'group theories' enunciated at the time), but so does Nikkimaria, whose edit focused on 'became', which here has a futuritive implication ('were to become'). IG's ryptogrammic approach set off a wave of similar speculations which were to 'infect' many later theories, not only those versions within the Baconian fold. The two perspectives can be harmonized by writing:-

Ciphers became important to the alternate-authorship theories after thick books such as Ignatius L. Donnelly's The Great Cryptogram (1888) began to promote this approach.

Nishidani (talk) 11:55, 25 February 2011 (UTC)

Ciphers were important before Donnelly came along, so "with" is more appropriate.

I join Xover in praising Nikkimaria's copy-editing. It is excellent. Tom Reedy (talk) 12:42, 25 February 2011 (UTC)

Thanks! Alan, I did notice one edit conflict while I was copy-editing, but it didn't concern this passage and it was on a sentence I was already altering, so I just saved my version. I'm very sorry if I overlooked or unintentionally undid other changes of yours - as Xover mentioned, that's a consequence of the way I've been editing. I'll try to do smaller-scale edits to avoid those sorts of issues. Nikkimaria (talk) 13:15, 25 February 2011 (UTC)

No, keep to the large-scale edits. It's easier to do. The problems generated by your comprehensive review are miniscule, and can quickly be fixed.

Tom. Not in dispute, and I hope none of us is thin-skinned enough to think these exchanges bear any semblance to the pettiness of the pre-Arbcom state of affairs. The discursive sea-change effected of late on this page marks as radical a differences that which distinquishes the repartée of an Enlightenment salon from the style of barbaric sniping, or washerwomen's raillery, of the dark ages!

I had checked the lit before making that suggestion, and read Wadsworth's remark:-

'The importance of Donnelly's theories can be measured by the number of imitations they inspired. Sparked by his electric, if incomplete ideas, an army of scholars began to search for a more satisfactory cipher, with the result that occultism became a major characteristic of Baconian activity from 1888 on.' (p.57)

There were anagrams and acrostics before, yes. I am not familiar with precedents for the kind of ciphers that Donnelly devised.

Alan simply and correctly said that this took place in the age where alternative candidates (except as members of a group or coterie) were not available, as that is understood after single subjects came to challenge the Baconian ascendency (post 1895).

Nikki. I might add that (an issue I had with the language here a year ago) 'alternate-authorship theories' is slightly solecistic to my ear, though, I admit (cf. the 'become regarded' issue) that 'alternate' is now used as a synonym for 'alternative'. 'Alternate-authorship theories' in classical prose would refer to theories in which two candidates alternate for ascendency, since 'alternate' implies a field of two, which 'alternative' does not.Nishidani (talk) 15:14, 25 February 2011 (UTC)

Wadsworth was selective and misogynist in his history. Mrs. Pott was way ahead of Donnelly, and in fact Donnelly cribbed much of his early material from her. It is more accurate to say "with". Tom Reedy (talk) 17:58, 25 February 2011 (UTC)

Oh, fair suck of the sav. That's coming the raw prawn, to take politically correct Pott shots at Wadsworth with a link that reads:

'The subject of ciphers(so needful in a secret society) has been so long suppressed, that we note with pleasure the interest stimulated by a more general comprehension of this intricate subject. The pioneer efforts of Mr. Donnelley in this new old art or science, stimulated Mr. Wigston, Mr. Cary, Mr. Gould, Dr. Owen, Dr. Pryer, the Hon. H. Gibson, Mr. Bidder, Mr. E.V. Tanner and others, to prosecute this beguiling study.'

My memory of this is that Pott's word parallels influenced Donnelly, not ciphers. But we can drop it. I think everyone must be wondering if I need to detox on this surfeited infection contracted by promiscuous lounging in the fringy groves of suburran theories.Nishidani (talk) 21:13, 25 February 2011 (UTC)

Indeed your memory may be better than mine; I often cognitively conflate and delete. I'll delve further. Tom Reedy (talk) 21:25, 25 February 2011 (UTC)

She only briefly mentioned them in her first book and pointed out their importance in a later work, a few years after Donnelly, whose work she knew intimately, so my memory was at fault. Carry on! Tom Reedy (talk) 21:46, 25 February 2011 (UTC)

No worries, Nikkimaria, about any possible editorial clashes yesterday. I can see that that reversion was unintentional. I agree that it is best if you continue to edit in your fashion, as I will in mine. It all helps, and in the end it's all for the best. I haven't checked yet today, but already yesterday you had made a substantial contribution to the collective effort, and, as you see, it is appreciated. I think the article is in pretty good shape at this point. --Alan W (talk) 04:59, 26 February 2011 (UTC)

Perhaps not worth adding in, but for the record

I overlooked, in writing on the theme of excavating proof, that Donnelly had, following Bacon's precedent, endeavoured to do this. Shapiro mentions it. If for completeness, this needed to be added, then it would run like this

From hints in his code, Donnelly believed that important manuscripts had been secreted underground and sought permission to excavate the estate of one of Bacon's heirs, the Earl of Verulam. His bid was unsuccessful.

Where Ridge's ref would be.

• Ridge, Martin (1991). Ignatius Donnelly: the portrait of a politician. Saint Paul: Minnesota Historical Society Press. Retrieved 25 February 2011. {{cite book}}: Invalid |ref=harv (help)

But I don't suppose this is worth worrying about (save for the fact that those following in his wake, like Orville Owen, get some coverage for doing the same).Nishidani (talk) 15:59, 25 February 2011 (UTC)

We had this in before the great trimming, but sourced to Shapiro, IIRC. Tom Reedy (talk) 17:59, 25 February 2011 (UTC)

External links cleanup time

Ok, as I've hinted several times, we need to take a nice long critical look at the External links section. In order to get everyone off on the right foot—:-)—I've deleted the lot of it! (cue scary music)

The original links that were there can be found in this diff.

I've removed all the links from the article so that we can have a quick discussion of what type of links we should have there, and so that the “burden of proof” (so to speak) is on each link to be included; and so that we don't just pick our favourites from the existing links and lock in on those; a clean slate. The relevant guideline is WP:External links and the sections: What can normally be linked, Links to be considered, and Links normally to be avoided.

A few choice quotes from the guideline:

This page in a nutshell: External links in an article can be helpful to the reader, but they should be kept minimal, meritable, and directly relevant to the article.

…and…

Some acceptable links include those that contain further research that is accurate and on-topic, information that could not be added to the article for reasons such as copyright or amount of detail, or other meaningful, relevant content that is not suitable for inclusion in an article for reasons unrelated to its accuracy.

Some external links are welcome […], but it is not Wikipedia's purpose to include a lengthy or comprehensive list of external links related to each topic. No page should be linked from a Wikipedia article unless its inclusion is justifiable according to this guideline and common sense. The burden of providing this justification is on the person who wants to include an external link.

This guideline concerns external links that are not citations to sources supporting article content. If the website or page to which you want to link includes information that is not yet a part of the article, consider using it as a source for the article, and citing it. Guidelines for sourcing, which includes external links used as citations, are discussed at Wikipedia:Reliable sources and Wikipedia:Citing sources.

…and…

Links in the "External links" section should be kept to a minimum. A lack of external links or a small number of external links is not a reason to add external links.

…and…

There are several things that should be considered when adding an external link.

• […]
• Is the site content proper in the context of the article (useful, tasteful, informative, factual, etc.)?
• […]

Each link should be considered on its merits, using the following guidelines. As the number of external links in an article grows longer, assessment should become stricter. […]

And so forth, but you get the idea.

I'd like to see some thought put into what general type of link we should have in the article in light of the above. Not “this link is good” etc., but “A link to one website that provides and overview and further details on <the subject of the article>”. And keep in mind that this article is itself an overview article (so there is limited need for other overview material), and that its subject is the Shakespeare authorship question (and not Oxfordian, Baconian, Marlowite, or Derbyite theory; and neither is it about the organizations promoting those theories). That's not to say that it's verboten to link to such, but it suggests that we should perhaps rather be aiming for a link rather than a complement of links. Go! --Xover (talk) 12:45, 26 February 2011 (UTC)

Seems pretty straightforward. Remove all of the specific candidate links to the relevant pages, and you get:

Stratfordian

• David Kathman and Terry Ross's The Shakespeare Authorship Page
• Irvin Leigh Matus's All Things Shakespeare

*"Truth vs. Theory", Theodore Dalrymple

• Alan H. Nelson's Shakespeare Authorship Pages
• Claremont Shakespeare Clinic

General Non-Stratfordian

• The Shakespeare Authorship Trust
• The Shakespeare Authorship Roundtable
• The Shakespeare Authorship Coalition

I'd strike out only Dalrymple, which makes one excellent point, but fails the test. It is not a comprehensive review of the problem.

As to the bibliographical section, I leave that to others. Nishidani (talk) 14:41, 26 February 2011 (UTC)

I have done quite a lot of EL pruning (mainly to resist linkspam). In a good article like this, such pruning is a problem: a long list of good links can be very useful, yet such lists contradict WP:EL (the guideline) and are an invitation for passers by to add further links. I think this list should be heavily pruned to suit WP:EL and to avoid a potential FAC issue.

Re the "Primary sources" that were in "External links": Bacon's William Shakespeare and his Plays and Taylor's The Praise of Hemp-seed link to the actual source. The others link to a Google book which may or may not reveal some/all of the source. I can think of no reason for EL to have links to Google books. The other two sources are interesting but do not warrant an EL. These sources are in no way comprehensive, so I think they all should be removed.

Re the "Stratfordian" links above:

• The Nelson link strikes a WP:EL zealot as dubious because the page does not contain information useful for a fuller understanding of the SAQ topic (it contains links to such pages). Given Nelson's position, the link should probably be retained, but it would be hard to defend against a zealous EL pruner.

Actually, whatever the look of the pages, Nelson was, along with Matus, one of the two orthodox analysts of the problem who patiently and politely engaged over many years, with the heterodox schools, and was, (perhaps still is) invited regularly to give talks at their various forums and conferences. He is, in short, (despite Nina's recent protestations) acceptable to the non-academic 'opposition' as a knowledgeable orthodox scholar on their views.Nishidani (talk) 10:55, 27 February 2011 (UTC)

• I would remove the Claremont Shakespeare Clinic EL because it is not high value, and it is available via the "The Shakespeare Clinic" citation which already contains a link ([5]), and the target includes the www.cmc.edu link at the bottom.
• Result: Keep "The Shakespeare Authorship Page" and "All Things Shakespeare" and probably Nelson's page.

Re the "General Non-Stratfordian" links above:

• The first two suffer from the problem I mentioned about Nelson's page (the target of the link does not actually contain useful information).
• The "Shakespeare Authorship Coalition" link is dubious because it is just an advocacy page (a petition); it appears to have no useful information on the topic of this article. Further, the article includes Declaration of Reasonable Doubt which has the external link.
• Despite what I have just said, I would be inclined to keep all three links to demonstrate NPOV and to avoid future pointless arguments. Or, if the "pro" links were pruned to just two, then also prune the "con" links to two.

I agree that the links for other candidates do not belong on this page.

The standard WP:EL way of dealing with long lists of links is to insert a single "Open Directory Project" (aka ODP or dmoz) link. Fortunately, the dmoz target already exists (see "My EL section" just below).

It is possible to request additions to the dmoz page, so if we wanted to brutally prune links from here, someone could request that they be added to the dmoz page. The great thing about the dmoz link is that in the future, when someone tries to add a dubious link, they can be told that the correct procedure is to have it added to the dmoz page.

We should consider removing the section headings. Possibly a brief description of each link could be added. My EL section would look like this:

• Shakespeare authorship at Curlie
• David Kathman and Terry Ross's The Shakespeare Authorship Page
• Irvin Leigh Matus's All Things Shakespeare
• Alan H. Nelson's Shakespeare Authorship Pages
• The Shakespeare Authorship Trust
• The Shakespeare Authorship Roundtable
• The Shakespeare Authorship Coalition

Johnuniq (talk) 03:57, 27 February 2011 (UTC)

Ok, my take on this... Kathman/Ross, Matus, and Nelson are all RS in their own right and they provide further information that cannot reasonably be incorporated into the article. Nelson doesn't host a lot of the material, but you might think of him as an editor in collecting and selecting the links. Kathman/Ross is the most comprehensive collection of information on the subject of the article on the web. The Shakespeare Authorship Coalition is pure advocacy and does not belong here. The Shakespeare Authorship Roundtable, while it does provide some links and a reading list, does not have significant information content. I was more ambivalent of The Shakespeare Authorship Trust because they are clearly (by definition) and advocacy organization; but I've come down on the side of inclusion because they actually provide a nice overview of the candidates, including summaries of the bios and cases for, as well as a reading list per candidate. They also uncritically link to The Shakespeare Authorship Roundtable (and a few others) from every candidate page, in what I can only assume is an effort to promote it, but I don't think that's a big enough issue to disqualify them. I am not in favor of a link to dmoz. So… my proposal would then be:

• The Shakespeare Authorship Page—a collection of information by David Kathman and Terry Ross
• All Things Shakespeare—essays and information by Irvin Leigh Matus
• Shakespeare Authorship Pages—a collection of links to information and research by Alan H. Nelson
• The Shakespeare Authorship Trust—an organization dedicated to promoting the Shakespeare authorship question

Which seems a reasonable selection both in terms of coverage and in number of links. --Xover (talk) 21:02, 27 February 2011 (UTC)

Theorists and supporters

This list is idiosyncratic, and looks random. If it were comprehensive, we would have a full list of the Declaration of Doubt, or, even whittled down, a cast of hundreds of major and minor folks. As it is we have, it's a short Foucaldian laundrey list, expunging a big name like Nietzshe in favour of the learned counsel for the pirates of Penzance chucked in with Robin Williams, a computer geek specializing in manuals for Macintosh, who's recently revived Sidney's candidature, with absolutely no impact on opinion, alongside a handful of the usual suspects. There seems to be no criterion for exclusion/inclusion, and this aleatory aspect would worry me, were I a worrier, which(who?) I ain't.Nishidani (talk) 14:49, 26 February 2011 (UTC)

Its purpose is purely promotional to elevate its visibility. What other theory, scientific or non, would think to have such a list? Look around Wikipedia and you won't see any such template sections. Tom Reedy (talk) 16:02, 26 February 2011 (UTC)

Well, perhaps it would help to think of it as an aide to navigation rather than as a part of the informational content of the article. I'm sure it could be improved, but in general it looks fair enough for what it is. --Xover (talk) 20:33, 27 February 2011 (UTC)

That's the authorship template, which is strictly not really part of this article. It justs lists people whose articles discuss the matter in sigfnificant detail. There would be no point adding Nietzsche. I think Walt Whitman should certainly go. He made a passing remark, that's all. Mark Twain wrote a booklet, so maybe he should stay. However, Whitman's passing remark gets the full Smatprt treatment in his article. Twain's never mentions the subject. Paul B (talk) 20:55, 27 February 2011 (UTC)

You must be psychic. [6] [7] Tom Reedy (talk) 16:16, 28 February 2011 (UTC)

I've made bold to remove Whitman and Williams. As it stands, we have people who made a substantial contribution to the debate (Wilde shouldn't be there though). If we allow Williams to get in because of her recent book, the precedent is set for listing a few dozen other minor blips on the advocacy screen. I think the criterion should be, do our RS treat the supporter or theorist at length (which means Wilòde should go, as well).Nishidani (talk) 15:52, 28 February 2011 (UTC)

I've edited the template and added Alden Brooks, who certainly deserves a place, and proved influential (Diana Price's recent book is unimaginable without it), and he proposed a distinct candidate, plus Charlton Greenwood Ogburn, who is ignored while his son's work, which builds on his material, is showcased, rather unfairly. Thirdly I have rearranged the figures in chronological order. Nishidani (talk) 16:08, 28 February 2011 (UTC)

Shakespeare_authorship_question#Case_against_Shakespeare.27s_authorship

I'm a bit perturbed by the opening paragraph of this section (BTW, shouldn't it be "The case against..."?), which starts by name-checking other playwrights for whom there isn't much documentary evidence and looks like part of the case for. It seems to me that the section should start at "The lacunae in [Shakespeare's] biography are adduced to draw inferences, which are then treated as circumstantial evidence against his fitness as an author.[29]" The current preceding sentences could then be added at the end or, probably better, inserted somewhere (in a new section?) in the "[The] case for..." section. Apologies if this has been raised previously, and feel free to shoot me down in flames. --GuillaumeTell 16:57, 27 February 2011 (UTC)

Commenting only on the heading: per our manual of style headings "do not use a, an, or the as the first word...unless by convention it is an inseparable part of a name (The Hague)". FWIW. Nikkimaria (talk) 18:11, 27 February 2011 (UTC)

We learn something new every day! I can see the point for article titles, but it seems rather odd for section headings. --GuillaumeTell 18:44, 27 February 2011 (UTC)

I see your point, but I don't consider it a significant issue. The relevant paragraph is an introduction to the entire section, and as such helps to explain how a case can be made at all. As I've mentioned elsewhere, I think we've now become overly sensitive to this kind of issue; deathly afraid that we'll somehow offend the tender reader with Orthodoxy and that worst of all sins, Objective Fact. I'm fairly strongly inclined to leave well enough alone here. — Preceding unsigned comment added by Xover (talk • contribs) 16:10, 27 February 2011 (UTC)

Are we ready to take the plunge (to FAC)?

Ok, the final adjustments, copy-edits, and polishing seem to be petering out; so I'd say we're as ready as we'll ever be to take the plunge and nominate for FAC.

Anyone who feels we're still not ready or wants more time to kick the tires please yell “WAIT!” as soon as possible.

I can take care of the technical bits of the nomination; but who wants to put their name in as co-noms? Tom and Nishidani don't get to beg off, so they'll get put in there no matter what. But who else? Paul? Alan? Anyone else? There's no need to be shy; it's more a “I support this nom and will help address issues” than some kind of “I'm the bestest editor in the whole wide world” declaration (otherwise I would have begged off myself, on the grounds that my minor contributions have been more grunt work than actual article content). Speak up!

And let me take the opportunity to give a great big “Thank you!” to everyone involved and all the great work put in; including everyone from Tom and Nishidani's spectacular work on writing it in the first place, through everyone that has contributed to greater or lesser degree, either directly or even just by commenting on the Talk page (which is also a valuable contribution!), to the wonderful fixes, trimming, and copy-editing that's gone in as we approach the finish-line. Particularly Rührfisch and Nikkimaria—who were kind to even do reviews of images and references when requested, and went above and beyond afterwards—deserve some major kudos! --Xover (talk) 21:28, 27 February 2011 (UTC)

I still have a bit of anxiety about the Oxfordian section. Several points were brought up by Smatprt and Smatprt that I think deserve consideration, tho I haven't been able to stomach going back through them to harvest what is usable. (I almost completely burnt out on this.) I'll check and bring a few points up within a few hours. Tom Reedy (talk) 22:55, 27 February 2011 (UTC)

Here are the points given by Smatprt in the arbitration that I think deserve consideration (the 1604 issue is completely bogus so I didn't include it):

1. contemporary reputation as a courtly poet

2. Puttenham’s inclusion of him on a list of court poets who were generally little-known (Oxfirdians take that to mean they were “hidden” poets

3. Oxford’s intimacy with Elizabethan court life

4. Oxford’s travels to places that were used as settings in the plays

5. his education and “academic and cultural achievements” (whatever those are supposed to be)

6. literary parallels between the canon and Oxford’s known works (including letters) and underlined passages in his Bible

We can check those against what we have and adjust to suit. Tom Reedy (talk) 23:38, 27 February 2011 (UTC)

Tom, there was also the issue that we have the 'Mente videbor' thing is in this article, but it is not in the 'main' article. It seems that many Oxfordians think this is nonsense, so perhaps it should be dropped. Poujeaux (talk) 16:56, 28 February 2011 (UTC)

I would like add a "Thank you!" to Johnuniq for his excellent support in recent weeks. Since it wouldn't be seemly for you to thank yourself, Xover, I will single you out for special credit as well. Your unwavering devotion to all things Shakespeare on Wikipedia should not be taken for granted. As for going in as co-nom, Xover, if it will be of any help, I will do it, as I have done my own share of grunting here recently. I seem to have become more involved in this article than I had originally intended, but it often works out that way with me on Wikipedia, and I haven't really regretted any of these situations. The only reason I would hesitate somewhat here is that the FAC process is very time-oriented, and I'm not sure that I will have that much time to participate in the next few weeks. Also, I will be unable to answer questions that rely on consulting secondary sources, as I have only one in my possession right now, and even that has to be returned to the library eventually. If you still think my joining as co-nom will be helpful, then please tell me what I have to do to sign in when the time comes (though I imagine I'll be able to figure it out easily enough once I see what you do). --Alan W (talk) 23:24, 27 February 2011 (UTC)

I have many of the secondary sources, as well as most of the articles quoted, so we don't need to worry about that end, anyway. (I've started putting all my books online here, but it's a slow process.) Tom Reedy (talk) 23:38, 27 February 2011 (UTC)

Let's wait until there are no significant edits for a day or two, then nominate. That is likely to be soon, so planning is a good idea. Xover could make the nomination and could mention Tom Reedy and Nishidani as major contributors, or they could sign as co-noms. Or, if helpful for the process, Alan could be a co-nom. Those names seem right to me. What is important is to coordinate the nomination time so that people are able to respond to reviewer comments: responses will have to be fast. In particular, Tom and his library needs to be available. Should the nom link to WP:ARBSAQ?

Can someone fix this "citation needed": "Contemporary comments and textual and stylistic studies indicate that the author of these works is compatible with the known biography of William Shakespeare of Stratford-upon-Avon." Johnuniq (talk) 08:49, 28 February 2011 (UTC)

Although I'm not familiar with the process, I would like Nishidani and myself to be co-nominators, since we both put in more than a year of work on this article with FA status as the goal. And since nobody else seems concerned about the Oxfordian section, I'll leave it as it is. Tom Reedy (talk) 13:28, 28 February 2011 (UTC)

I'd prefer not to co-nominate, given my record, given the fact that there is no parity between Tom and myself, I am a(n albeit sturdy) sutler following a programmatic train he rode forth to form a one-man vanguard of, in what most oldhands thought a folly of Quixotic proportions, to bring a condemned article towards FA level, something of which I knew, at the time, nothing about. I think Paul Barlow, the quiet performer here, should take that place. Thirdly, I haven't the slightest clue about procedures, technicalities, and am hamfisted in anything regarding them, or forums requiring imput that assumes such knowledge. This has been, lastly, a long systole of trying pressures relieved by a elating diastole of companionate editing with a team of fellows who pitched in with a palkmary acuity of structural and textual judgement I've rarely had the pleasure to observe. Hats off, (chapeau!) Nikkimaria, Xover, Alan, Johnuniq, Guilliame Tell, Kanguole, Kaiguy and several others. I'll of course chip in, like Tom, Alan, if refs and book content needs to be sourced. Nishidani (talk) 15:17, 28 February 2011 (UTC)