Talk:Rat (newspaper)

Comment
An edit of Rat (Newspaper) succeeded in introducing some major grammatical errors, rendering readable sentences unreadable, and leaving the article with no meaningful conclusion whatsoever.

EXAMPLE (from edited version): "The significance of the women's takeover of Rat marked a sharp break with the sixties that had ended just a month before. Although the all-inclusive "Movement" was never a centralized monolith, and it was already bifurcated along racial lines, and the women's seizure of Rat marked the beginning of its fragmentation into feminists, gays, environmentalists, and reformers working within the system, who were committed to a very different sort of revolution than the radicals of the '60s."

ORIGINAL: "The significance of the women's takeover can hardly be overestimated. It marked a sharp break with the Sixties that had ended just a month before. Although the all-inclusive "Movement" was of course never a centralized monolith, and it was already bifurcated along racial lines, the women's seizure of Rat marked the beginning of its rapid and fatal fragmentation. From that point on, young activists identified themselves primarily as feminists, gays, environmentalists, peaceniks, reformers working within the system, or as Marxist-Leninists committed to a very different sort of revolution. "

While it may be true that the original is guilty of unsupported opinion-mongering and hyperbole, it does have the virtue of making sense! If Wikipediea deals with generally worthy articles that skate to close to the edge of the rule-book by reducing the articles to gibberish (or worse, semi-gibberish that sort of seems to make sense but doesn't), doesn't that defeat the purpose? Like, totally?

Factual citations are demanded for a couple of relatively trivial, anecdotal and uncontroversial (as well as totally undocumentable) details which the author introduced from personal experience to add substance and a bit of "local color" to the general arguments that Rat (a) was in fact profiting from sexism before the women's takeover, and (b) was thoroughly involved in the rock music scene of the late 1960s.

Would-be editors should appreciate that while the vast majority of subjects are appropriate for detailed academic citations, a few are not. The underground press's only documentation is in a few anecdotes published in purported "histories of the sixties" — usually axe-grinding memoirs — and in assorted copies of papers themselves that have been preserved in a very few libraries, usually on microfilm. Consequently, about the only available "expertise' on a subject like Rat takes the form of first-hand experience, or anecdote-gathering by younger researchers who track down aging one-time staff members. In this case, I don't think it's a violation of Wikipedia guidelines to let this pass. I am providing footnotes to back them up, but it merely clutters up the page without adding anything but self-evident information.

I agree that my conclusion (now erased) was weak and veering off-topic, and perhaps deserved its fate. (But something should have been done to avoid ending in mid-air on a non-sequitur!) I intend to rewrite it now, correcting those faults but still offering a further thought or two on where Rat fit into the transition of protest politics from the Movement of the Sixties to the single-issue subcultures of the Seventies and beyond. Such general observations on a topic that seems relatively narrow - the tale of a single short-lived hippie newspaper - might seem inappropriate, but historical trends always emerge from inappropriate sources in real life. And I think we can agree that Wikipedia must above all remain anchored in real life, or risk degenerating into a confetti-storm of academic citations blowing aimlessly every which way for the sake of often-meaningless nit-picking.


 * I'm really happy to see your contributions here, and I'm interested to learn more about the Rat and the history of the underground press in general. However, I suspect you haven't looked into the premise and policies of Wikipedia: your writing will likely be severely edited until you do so.  While I'd personally love to read a good account of life at the Rat filled with colorful detail and opinionated interpretations of events, such an account is unambigously prohibited by the basic policies of Wikipedia. For better or worse, Wikipedia insists on dry encyclopedic accounts that are based exclusively on previously published sources.  Wikipedia has only three editorial policies--I think you'll save yourself a lot of aggravation if you read them: WP:NPOV, WP:NOR and WP:V.  If you want to say that these policies are biased toward writing about science or about well-established academic disciplines, and they will not lead to the best possible histories of largely undocumented cultural phenomena such as countercultural papers, I'd tend to agree.  Likewise if you want to point out the irony of shoehorning accounts of a movement that challenged social boundaries into a rigid policy.  But the policies stand, and there is a bureaucracy in place to enforce them. Fortunately, there seems to be some room for negotiation case-by-case, but you won't ever be happy here if you insist on writing first person essays.  I recommend that you take a look at the policies linked above and revise your edits accordingly, so that the good info you are bringing to Wikipedia will remain available. BTfromLA 00:29, 25 June 2006 (UTC)

Okay, thanks for a reasonable and gracious reply, and I'll take your advice. Now if you can just approach your next editorial assault with the same care and thoughtfulness you put into this message, we might end up with a readable and meaningful article!

Reads like an essay
Most of this piece still reads like a personal essay, not an encyclopedia article. It needs a lot of re-writing to clean it up. See "What Wikipedia is not" at. I have added the unencyclopedic tag. Invertzoo (talk) 12:32, 21 June 2008 (UTC)


 * Amen. --UnicornTapestry (talk) 18:00, 24 October 2008 (UTC)

Who's to say how an encyclopedia article should read? What *exactly* are the elements of the 'encyclopedic style'? Why is it *essential* to adhere to that formula ... because it was invented in 1800-something? Tradition? Since WP is supposedly breaking new ground ... who gets to decide just what 'style' is acceptable? Where's the discussion page for that? Some kinds of subjects are intrinsically more suited to different styles. Who wants to see a story about a down-and-dirty-60s-underground operation dressed up in a gray flannel suit? Noone but grey flannel suit people, that's who. Guess why many of us turned to zines to find out what was really happening? Because the old formulas were used to lie to us all the time, that's why. There's an academic subject worth considering before dumping on people who're experimenting. No fraking wonder oeople who've still got got an imagination are fleeing WP as fast as they can. And you don't need to tell me an encyclopedia is no place to be creative. That's what my 9th-grade teacher would have said to me long before you were born. And it's also why most people with a life would never have owned a paper encyclopedia unless they had a bad table leg. Honestly, some editors around this DIVE needa check their necks for teethmarks. Twang (talk) 21:53, 16 August 2009 (UTC)

What the hell?
Parts of this article are self-justifying, self-serving, and inflated, not to mention occasionally wrong. "Although the takeover itself was both necessary…" attempts to rationalize the seizure, presumably in Marxist/feminist terms. It fails to acknowledge that the takeover doomed the newspaper to extinction after several issues.

The article then lapses into polemics, "What had been a diverse but essentially unified Movement assaulting the walls of "The Establishment" suddenly found itself reduced to an assortment of single-issue subcultures, each with its own mini-ideology, its own jargon, its own protests, and its own separate goals. This had the effect of dissolving the Enemy into a variety of abstract categories…" blah blah blah. I THINK they are trying to say the feminist and then lesbian takeovers made significant positive social contributions.

However, its grandiose declaration "To recognize the strategic consequences of the Movement's break-up, however, is not to say that history would have turned out any better if it had been defeated in a bloodbath…" belies what actually happened, that the feminist coup resulted in the ultimate destruction of the newspaper.

I'm not entirely certain, but I'm fairly sure the Slum Goddess was an East Village Other feature, not one of Rat's. Indeed, one of the pathetically few (4) references begs for Slum Goddess attribution. If I'm correct, it's one more example of a muddled, apparently drug-laced perspective of this article.

In any case, NPoV has been entirely lost and this article deserves to be rewritten from an impartial standpoint and without the hyperbole such as "New York's most notorious newspaper".

--UnicornTapestry (talk) 17:59, 24 October 2008 (UTC)