Talk:On Beauty

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Wiki Education Foundation-supported course assignment

This article is or was the subject of a Wiki Education Foundation-supported course assignment. Further details are available on the course page. Student editor(s): Spadaccisn.

Above undated message substituted from Template:Dashboard.wikiedu.org assignment by PrimeBOT (talk) 05:40, 17 January 2022 (UTC)[reply]

You said "established experts"?

Dear Wikipedians,

I sorry to inform you that montraykreyol.org is not a "personal website who is not an established expert".

If you pursue investigations, you will discover that this website is edited by Mr Raphaël CONFIANT who is a famous French Caribbean writer besides he is Professor at the Université des Antilles et de la Guyane, in Creole section.

So, if Mr. POINSOT's article on Zadie Smith's novel On Beauty is published in Mr. CONFIANT's website, it may be because his work is reliable, don't you think so?

Thank you for restoring my revision which should feed the information of your readers.

Regards

What we see here is two single purpose accounts (WP:SPA), whose sole purpose is to promote an essay written by someone who is not recognized as an expert on this topic. The latest attempt inserts a sentence "Smith uses also the baroque reversal feature of the carnival writing in relation with the transculturation of the Haitian voodoo by Hector Hyppolite's painting of the Goddess Erzulie" that is not comprehensible. I've read the book, but I have no idea what this means. This seems to be making an extremely obscure point, unlike the rest of the material in the section. The external link goes to a landing page with three long PDFs. Where in the PDFs is the information about carnival writing?

I'm still skeptical that this is a reliable source--the owner of the website may be reliable, but the owner of the website did not write these PDFs. But maybe there could be a case that these PDFs are of more general encyclopedic interest. Just an obscure comment about carnival writing is not enough--this looks more like a spam link than anything else. I'd like to see something in the correct reference format--not an external link stuck in the middle of the paragraph--with a page number to indicate where we should find the material on carnival writing. Finally, there should be clear prose that makes an important point about the book itself (not about carnival writing--On Beauty is not about carnivals), for which it is necessary to have some reference.

Otherwise all we have is two special purpose accounts using any means possible to increase hits on a non-expert essay. By the way, if you google "Joss Pentoscope" you will see that this person has placed spam links to this essay in several blogs around the internet.

Logical Cowboy (talk) 16:05, 12 November 2010 (UTC)[reply]

An extremely obscure point... for a Cowboy!

As a general rule, I prefer to avoid to be unpleasant, but there a moment when the things must be said clearly.

As Zadis Smith is a novelist, it would be the least to have studied literature before to pretend to have an opinion.

Now, it is not surprising that a holder of an associate degree (even in technology) do not manage to understand an article that deals with baroque literature of which the Ulysses of James Joyce belongs to. It is not a matter of capacity, but it is a matter of cultural background: I am sure that the writer of this essay won't be able to fix a dishwhasher, for example! It is normal that a post-graduate text seems "obscure" to the ordinary mortals, but we are into an encyclopedia, not into a dictionnary.

Having said this, it is wrong to say that On beauty is not a novel on carnival: novels do not tell stories only with the fiction, they do it also with their style (what Zadie Smith calls "formalism"), when the writer is an artist: each lover of literature knows this.

Unfortunaltely, it is easy to see how Logical Cowboy is not at ease with textual things: in his comments, he mistook sentence and paragraph (!!!).

It would be better for Mr Logical Cowboy to stop to censor what he does not understand and stop to try to justify himself with petty technical quibbling... all the more because his general knowledge makes of him the King of blue-pencil (12 edits in the last day with 7 for vandalisms!): it borders paranoia !

Moreover, I noticed that for the guardians of wikipedia, each link that does not lead to a Wikipedia article is not a reliable source. Now, the encyclopedia has to serve the world understanding and not the contrary: it is just a matter of epistemology...

Best regards.

Deborah Duncan (talk) 20:25, 12 November 2010 (UTC)[reply]

—Preceding unsigned comment added by Deborah Duncan (talk • contribs) 14:44, 11 November 2010 (UTC)[reply]

It's a shame that you are resorting to personal attacks. You don't know me. Let's stick to the rules. Logical Cowboy (talk) 06:22, 13 November 2010 (UTC)[reply]

I don't see where the shame is. As you told very precisely: I don't know you. So let me ask you how how it could be a personal attack (it serves you right for hiding behind a pseudo for censoring texts!)? No, really, I am afraid I just said platitudes when I wrote that it is hard for the ordinary mortals to understand a little bit in-depth work... even if I do think that the richness of your argumentation is really considerable: one sentence on you, what is irrelevant to the subject of the article. It is a shame that non expert people of the question - I should say neophytes - dare to erase texts on the pretxt they are not able to understand anything of what they are reading... and dare kick up a fuss on top of that!

By the way, since when the cowboys neglect their cows to try to take on encyclopedia?

Godspeed!

Deborah Duncan (talk) 12:21, 13 November 2010 (UTC)[reply]

promotion of personal website

I have deleted an external link to a personal website, per WP:SPS and WP:ELNO.

http://www.montraykreyol.org/spip.php?article4077

Basically, this is a link to promote a self-published source from someone who is not an established expert.

Also see WP:ELNO point 11.

Logical Cowboy (talk) 22:37, 16 October 2010 (UTC)[reply]

I am a Third Opinion Wikipedian. Your Third Opinion request has been removed from the list of active disputes since Snottywong has, in light of the nature of the dispute, given a third opinion by giving this warning. Regards, TRANSPORTERMAN (TALK) 13:48, 18 October 2010 (UTC)[reply]

External links modified

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