Talk:Literary quotations

This could get to be a huge and shambolic mess, nice idea though it is. I think this would be a suitable case for sub-pages, oreven as category in its own right? sjc

On the other hand, it's not an encyclopedia article. :-/ --LMS
 * What is an wikipedia article anyway ? What is Wikipedia about ?
 * Writing dissertations or collect human knowledge and human thought with Wikipedian creativity.
 * If you like to be totally encyclopedic you ought to remove hyperlinks they are not encyclopedic in the first place.
 * Kpjas

Conversely, it would be nice to be able to link one's biographies, etc, to some apposite quotations about or by the person one is writing about. I agree that strictly speaking it's not an encyclopedia article in the conventional sense, but then Wikipedia doesn't seem to be shaping as an encyclopedia in the conventional sense, it's much more interesting and complex than that. sjc

But Wikipedia articles are encyclopedia articles in the conventional sense, even if the browsing and creation formats are totally unconventional. Anyway, I don't have anything specifically against a list of quotations. I just think it's mainly distracting attention from our main brief, which is to write an encyclopedia. --LMS

Some kind of sorting will be needed. I suggest sub-pages with respect to author. Then we can easily link from the author page to famous examples of his/her writing on the Literary quotations sub-page. The Literary quotations top-page could be made more encyclopedic if someone would tells about the history and sociology of using literary quotations.

Again, I am strongly opposed to any such suggestion. I think we should focus on writing encyclopedia articles. Perhaps someone could start a quotations wiki. That might be fun.

If anything, you might add quotations from a famous author at the bottom of a biography about the author. That would be more useful in the context of an encyclopedia. Similarly, it is useful in the context of an encyclopedia to upload a person's works, linked from that person's page; see, e.g., William Shakespeare.

In the context of an encyclopedia, a list of quotations per se is just not very useful. It's not what an encyclopedia is for.

By the way, I don't know why the page is called "literary quotations." Or is it important that the quotations be from "literary" sources? If so, are we going to start other pages with "philosophical quotations," "political quotations," etc.? God, I hope not. --LMS

I do take your point about the slow and inexorable descent into the ridiculous that this might presage. Your idea about the quotations wiki is an excellent one and it further suggests that we might also have dictionary wikis and mathematical formulae wikis and philosophical argument wikis..... The potential for wiki spin-off fragmentation is truly amazing. sjc

I like and second the proposal to make subpages on per person basis. It indeed would be easier to link to, more systematic and logical. Kpjas

- But I wonder if it wouldn't be better in the long run to start a brief page about whoever said each quotation and to include that information in it.... --KQ

Actually, a page about rather than of quotations might be a nice idea - it was not uncommon for a book to be a compendium of quotations from famous authors, the prime example being Robert Burton's Anatomy of Melancholy, and there is the fact that for some ancient writings, all we have of a particular work is an extract quoted by someone else... --Malcolm Farmer


 * For all of the above, see Wikiquote which is a sister project containing quotations, literary and otherwise and Wiktionary which is a sister project containing a wiki dictionary.