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This is quite the promotion here--short on facts, not on words. I notice there isn't any publication information for any of the books, there are a few gratuitous links at the bottom ('See also Middle Earth'?), and there isn't a single external source besides the subject's own website. Are there no reviews of any of these books? And that throwaway Harry Potter claim, shouldn't that be, well, thrown away? Drmies (talk) 02:21, 23 September 2008 (UTC)[reply]
Well, over a decade has passed and the article does now have a few reliable sources, but it's still a bit ad-like. That odd impression would only be reinforced if the current attempt by an editor to document the revised edition of Scull & Hammond's The J. R. R. Tolkien Companion and Guide as a separate publication from its first edition were to be allowed to remain in the article. That approach might make sense for a Chronology of books on Tolkien when the work would then appear under two separate years; but in a (VERY brief) biographical article, it looks at best WP:UNDUE, at worst like a promotion (WP:ADV), a curious thing for an editor who does not appear to be linked with Scull, Hammond, or for that matter HarperCollins or Houghton Mifflin. It's the same book, with the same title, the same authors, and the same subject. Yes, it has been greatly expanded; but then, that's not such an unusual thing for a revised edition. If the intention is to emphasize how arduous, lengthy, and admirable the work is, then the article should be citing reliable secondary sources, being WP:OR otherwise.
Actually much the same happened at the article on the book itself with this edit; I fixed the problem by restructuring the (at that point amazingly unreadable and uninformative) article – it had just one heading, which was, take a guess, "Revised and expanded Edition (2017)" (promo or what!) – by converting the article from catalogue-speak to prose and writing a "Reception" section from the remarkably warm and generous critical reviews of the book.
So, I wish the Tolkien scholars and their books well: but we don't serve them well by trying to turn Wikipedia into a bookseller's catalogue. Since there are good sources available, we should use them; we should not be trying, for some indiscernible reason, to bulk up authors' articles with surplus bibliographic information at the expense of reliably-cited prose. Chiswick Chap (talk) 13:33, 12 November 2022 (UTC)[reply]
