Wikipedia talk:Featured list candidates/List of works by Joseph Priestley

Nit picking and dumping

It seems strange to start a discussion page on a Featured list candidacy, but the alternative was to write separate messages to two people, which seemed wasteful if nothing else.

If you want to oppose the list based on its use dashes, that's fine, but I feel that such stylistic decisions are irrelevant to the usefulness of the list.

No, I don't want to oppose. If I did want to oppose, it would be for something more important than the presence or absence of dashes.

Yes, the presence or absence of dashes is irrelevant to the usefulness of the list. But it seems relevant, in a minor way, to its efficiency, even to its understandability.

I agree with you that sometimes style can affect understanding. I don't think that is the case here, however. To people who regularly use bibliographies, the list is perfectly understandable. Awadewit | talk 12:09, 1 August 2007 (UTC)

Schofield's book is not the kind of thing that gets reviewed in the TLS or the NYRB - it is too scholarly. Happily, I have read academic reviews of the book. They do not discuss the bibliography (again, I've never seen an academic review that discusses a book's bibliography); they only discuss the content of the biography.

Schofield's book, which I haven't seen, sounds to me like the kind of thing that does sometimes get reviewed in the TLS and the like, perhaps in conjunction with putatively related books. And I have on occasion seen reviews that comment knowledgably on bibliographies that are minor parts of larger works.

The more important point is that Schofield's book has only been reviewed by academics and they do not discuss his bibliography, so, therefore, the only information I have on the bibliography is what Schofield outlines in his book. Awadewit | talk 12:09, 1 August 2007 (UTC)

I am stunned at the nit-picking here. [...] That is not a reason to dump on this impressive effort

Perhaps it's me who's being referred to here. While WP has the rule "AGF", it does not have a rule of "assume excellence" and I'm not going to assume excellence in any list that's put up for, um, featurization or whatever it's called.

The list looks good. I'm trying to improve it in some minor ways (elimination of massive repetition) and to test whether it really is excellent. If what I'm doing looks like nit-picking, this could be because, yes, it's nit-picking: nits are irritating little things, and if I had any I'd want them eliminated. But I don't think it's hair-splitting: Other people may witter away about how one style guide is better than another, and how for example page numbers should or shouldn't be prefaced by "p." or "pp." (with or without the dot) -- not me.

If I conclude that the list is indeed excellent, I shall be delighted to support it.

If I decide that the list is significantly flawed in some way that's easy to fix, I'll ask for a fix, fix it myself, or, if this is rebuffed (reverted), reconsider my objection and either retract it or vote oppose. And I won't worry much about any bad vibes that the oppose vote might engender. (I might add that I don't expect to find such flaws, and that I am not spoiling for a fight.)

If what I'm doing looks like dumping, I regret this; and (to continue with this anatomical metaphor) I'm quite willing to butt out, with neither a support nor an oppose.

In the meantime, I'm trying to think of ways of turning a good list into a better one. I may not achieve this aim, but it seems a pretty good aim to me. -- Hoary 07:02, 1 August 2007 (UTC)

I think your goals are commendable. The difficulty arose when the tone of the comments, and the suggestions of nits to be picked (not necessarily yours to be sure; I was not keeping track to be honest), took a certain turn that was not particularly appreciative of this level of effort. I now understand that a featured list was originally just supposed to be some sort of navigational aid inside WP, and that is what is causing the consternation; this is a different type of beast. However, this is also giving us a glimpse of what WP could become, if we nurture it appropriately. --Filll 13:37, 1 August 2007 (UTC)