Talk:Revivalistics

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Self-promotion
This page adopts a promotional tone and does not present a balanced view of the material. The article is replete with praise and the contribution of this monograph is inflated in my opinion. I do not believe the book meets the criteria for inclusion in Wikipedia based on notability. A quick search on Google Scholar shows that almost all references to the term "revivalistics" are in the subject's own publications, co-authored publications, or reviews of the subject's book of the same title. (I will make no formal mention the fact that most of the saccharine reviews of the book are written by close associates of the book's author, a fact easily detectable to those of us working in this field.) Regardless of notability, the article reads like an advertisement. The only critical discussion of the book is in a LinguistList review; conveniently, this article only cherry-picks the words of praise and ignores the observation that Zuckermann's suggestions about 'revivalistics' are "rarely spelled out as a research program or accompanied by empirical data" and that "the book is too fragmented, does not give a state-of-the-art overview, is anecdotal over large parts, and does not introduce or define key concepts and research methodologies".

Pinging here, who I believe has also been looking into this, and  who is the author and main contributor to this article. I believe the best course of action will be to nominate this article for deletion. Sunjaifriþas (talk) 19:16, 18 January 2024 (UTC)


 * @Sunjaifriþas. Thanks. I have just read your criticism and therefore removed the commendations by Stephen Fry, J. M. Coetzee, Peter Burke and Nicholas Ostler. Is there anything else you would like me to do to improve this page? The book has received many good reviews. The page consists of quotations by linguists other than Professor Zuckermann. The page seems solid and useful to people like me but you are welcome to change the tone or add whatever info you want. As I have already told Mathglot, I met Professor Zuckermann around 8 years ago at a lecture he delivered in Sydney. No connection or relation. No positive - or negative - COI. I have read and re-read his book “Revivalistics" and found it radical and impressive. Do you want me not to contribute? (I was already discouraged last time.) SuzieMillen (talk) 10:15, 20 January 2024 (UTC)
 * Thanks for your response! My suggestion would be that we work collaboratively to improve the page with close attention to neutral point of view (consulting WP:NPOV) and length (consulting WP:SIZE). I think it would be a good idea to first bring the article in line with those for other academic publications in linguistics, e.g. On the Definition of Word (note the length of the review section), or other popular books about language, e.g. Txtng: the Gr8 Db8. This will be a first step that must be conducted before any potential nomination for deletion.
 * Regarding positive reviews: In terms of WP:NPOV, I think removing most or even all of the positive quotations will be helpful. I suggest a couple of sentences like: "The book has received widespread praise for ... . The book has also been criticized for ... .". Possibly including one or two quotations to back up each side. I will make a new topic to lay out my concerns regarding notability, consulting WP:NBOOK.
 * Regarding feeling discouraged: the intention of everyone here is to make Wikipedia the best it can be and I, for one, want to encourage you to keep doing that. To do that collectively we have to discuss, critique, and build on each other's work. I appreciate your contributions and correspondence. With thanks, Sunjaifriþas (talk) 12:34, 20 January 2024 (UTC)

Notability


Hello, cc. I am jumping into this dicussion because I have flagged the Revivalistics article as WP:PROMOTION. The article is written in a promotional, non-neutral tone. I also consider the article to fall short of the Notability criteria. I appreciate that SuzieMillen has clarified her potential WP:COI issue. I also note that she has been reading and enjoying the book. However, the Revivalistics article in my view should be nominated for deletion. I intend to do this. Thanks for your attention, Sunjaifriþas (talk) 23:02, 18 January 2024 (UTC)
 * Sunjaifriþas, before you nominate it for deletion, please do two things: go through the WP:Deletion policy, and go through the references in the article, and assess whether they are reliable, and whether the coverage in the source is significant. (You can skip all the references to Zuckerman.) Once you have done that, assemble what you've learned, and if it still seems like the article topic is not notable, you can nominate it for deletion. Please note that you cannot delete an article because it is terribly written, poorly sourced, misleadingly sourced, promotional, or 100% false. Those are all invalid reasons. It is the topic of an article that determines WP:Notability, not the state of the written article about the topic. Please be very clear about that, before going to Afd. Thanks, Mathglot (talk) 00:12, 19 January 2024 (UTC)
 * Thanks very much for this reminder. Will do this as I think building the (lack of) notability case is a bit complicated in this case (this is why I haven't actually nominated it for deletion yet). In my opinion as an academic in this field, the book is not notable enough to require its own article. My opinion doesn't matter here, though; what's difficult is that a great a number of glowing reviews have been put out by associates of the book's author (which are liberally quoted in the article), so the book has been described as more notable than it is. It's difficult for me to demonstrate this in a non-anecdotal way, but I will try to do this as best I can before resorting to deletion. In this case, could a possible course of action be attempting a good-faith rewrite of the article? Any input appreciated! Many thanks, Sunjaifriþas (talk) 00:26, 19 January 2024 (UTC)
 * Sunjaifriþas, I'm a bit concerned about hijacking Suzie's page for this discussion. Please stand by, while I move a portion of this discussion. Mathglot (talk) 00:35, 19 January 2024 (UTC)

Hello again, Sunjaifriþas. I've moved the discussion here, as it's a more appropriate venue. Regarding your most recent question, absolutely rewriting it would be fine, as a WP:BOLD edit; see also WP:TNT. Given the amount of effort made by one user, it would be worth considering her prior work, especially with respect to keeping any sources that are worthwhile, and keeping any reasonable content based on them, but it's not a requirement, it's more hewing to the theme of collaboration here.

Anything based on an individual editor's interpretation by reading the primary source itself, can and should be discarded (and you shouldn't do any of that, either!). Of course, a few direct quotations from the primary source are fine, and ought to be included as illustrative examples of his key themes, but they should be illustrative also of points that authors of WP:SECONDARY sources are making *about* his book. It's important to avoid any whiff of WP:Original research, even if you are the author of the definitive critique of Zuckerman's work. (I should say, *especially if*, rather than "even if".) The place to start is with a bunch of sources, and if you're thinking of doing a TNT/rewrite, you can either do it piecemeal on the current page if you wish, unless that would make a neither-fish-nor-fowl crazy quilt during the transition, and in that case, you can, if you wish, just start fresh at Draft:Revivalistics, which will give you a blank slate upon which to begin. Click the red link if you wish to go that route. HTH, Mathglot (talk) 00:55, 19 January 2024 (UTC)
 * One other thing: it would be best to add bite-size chunks in this article or the draft, rather than just one, huge, Big Bang-style edit where you dump 15 kb of text in there at once. That gives you the chance to explain what you are doing in the WP:Edit summary field, which is pretty hard to do for an entire article, and also gives other editors an easier way to approach your changes, and either add, change, or even delete them. If you dump a huge amount of text in at once, that becomes more difficult. Finally, the revision history will reflect all of your edit summaries, and make it easier not only for other editors, but for you, when you look back and are trying to find where you added this or that to the article. Mathglot (talk) 01:06, 19 January 2024 (UTC)
 * (cc ) Thank you for your valuable input here. Having examined the criteria for notability at WP:NBOOK further, including WP:TEXTBOOKS I am happy to shelve the discussion regarding notability for now. I would like to make two observations for the sake of completeness. Aspects of these observations are based on my experience as an academic in this field and thus are anecdotal and true but (largely) not verifiable.
 * Many of the reviews appear to be written by assoicates of the book's author. This practice of soliticing positive reviews from colleagues or friends is unfortunately common. The purpose of such reviews is promotional, as can easily be seen in their inclusion on websites where the book is sold, e.g. |Amazon. In my view, this makes the first criterion of WP:NBOOK a low, easily surmountable, bar. This is a matter for policy and discussion at WP:NBOOK, I guess.
 * As an academic working in the field, I cannot say that this work is considered a significant contribution in this area of study as per notability criteria at WP:TXTBKS. While it could be described as an entertaining, interesting overview of some issues in the field, the originality of the research is questionable and its academic rigor certainly contested. This is evident in Patrick Heinrich's LinguistList review viz. the material is "rarely spelled out as a research program or accompanied by empirical data" and that "the book is too fragmented, does not give a state-of-the-art overview, is anecdotal over large parts, and does not introduce or define key concepts and research methodologies". This can, and should, be described in the article.
 * Many thanks, Sunjaifriþas (talk) 13:02, 20 January 2024 (UTC)
 * that's a reasonable approach for the time being, although you could always revisit this at some time in the future. I agree with you about point 1, and the weakness of the "awards" portion of the WP:Notability policy, and I think I complained about that at WT:N at some point in the past, without generating much response. But that is the proper locus of such a discussion, should you decide to take it up at some point. Ping me, if you do. Mathglot (talk) 12:07, 21 January 2024 (UTC)