Talk:The Farmer and the Viper

Untitled
doesn't the moral of this story contradict the one in "the Lion and the Mice"?

Northern Exposure
In an episode of Northern Exposure, Shelly tells the story to Maggie, but I don't remember why! —Tamfang (talk) 06:46, 15 March 2011 (UTC)

Popular and contemporary references
I note that on the page for The Farmer and the Viper you deleted my note in the Modern References section that the story appears in a film. Your specific reason was that it was, "irrelevant". I wonder, therefore, if you could please clarify your criteria for relevance in a way that makes it clear why a modern reference in a song is relevant but one in a film is not. Thank you.  Cottonshirt  τ   00:10, 28 September 2012 (UTC)


 * Thanks for your inquiry, Cottonshirt. My rule of thumb when dealing with modern references is whether it advances knowledge of the subject of the article. There are dozens of modern retellings of fables (in children's books, for example) which simply churn out the same story. They aren't noteworthy in encyclopedic terms, where only the most relevant facts can be selected. You give no indication of the fable's storyline in your note, just say it's cited by a Navaho in a film. So what? It's only something in a script. As for the song-reference, that was part of the list when I came to expand the article. It's a borderline case, but at least one can listen to the song and make one's own judgment about whether it's perpetuating the story in a new medium. As you may have noticed, a reference to the film was deleted earlier for the reasons I've given. Mzilikazi1939 (talk) 04:56, 28 September 2012 (UTC)


 * I agree with your rule that the criteria should be whether it advances knowledge of the subject of the article, even if I could not have expressed it that way myself. From which it would seem that being perpetuated is encyclopedic even if any particular example of that is not of itself hugely relevent. In which case, why not delete the whole, "Modern References" section altogether and just have a brief paragraph that says exactly that, that the fable is perpetuated in a wide variety of modern media, books, songs, and film, etc, (without necessarily naming any of them at all) indicating its continuing relevance. I'll let you decide, as I don't really have any ongoing interest in the article.
 * For reference, in the film Natural Born Killers, the Navaho invites into his home a serial killer, then tells him the story of the snake. Then the serial killer shoots the Navaho turning the fable into a prediction. The actual dialogue in the film is as follows: One day a woman went out looking for sticks, and in the snow she found a snake frozen almost to death. She took the snake home and nursed it back to health. One day, the snake bit her on the cheek, and as she lay dying the lady said, "Mister snake, why did you do that?" and the snake said, "You knew I was a snake."  Cottonshirt  τ   07:41, 28 September 2012 (UTC)

Hi, thanks for your understanding, Cottonshirt, and for filling me in on the version of the fable in Natural Born Killers. It's interesting that there's a woman in this version, where most previous ones have a farmer/countryman. I note that it's a woman in the 1968 song I cite - maybe that's why I retained it. It's the first instance of the woman variant and therefore encyclopaedic. The trouble with the 'Modern References' title for that section is that it does not express what it is about, which is adaptation and variation of the story, often in different genres. It's not enough to say simply that it happens, since WP policy is to cite sources for verifiability. So a few notable examples are given from which an idea is given of that variation. As I mentioned above, what is important is not that the original story is being repeated but that it is being applied to new situations and adapted. It obviously is not in the film. The lesson that the vicious do not respond to kindness was the situation the fable was designed to express 2500 years ago, so the film isn't being original. On the other hand, the Hawthorne and Kushwant Singh fictions do genuinely explore new territory and so add to our knowledge. Mzilikazi1939 (talk) 14:09, 28 September 2012 (UTC)

WP:SOAP
Most recent changes to this article have had reference to the Al Wilson song based on Aesop's fable and the use Donald Trump has been making of it during his 2016 campaign. In the light of this I have transferred a discussion from my Talk page to the section above this and give notice here that I mean to reverse my support of its use in the article and to delete it for the following reasons: Mzilikazi1939 (talk) 19:33, 20 September 2016 (UTC)
 * 1) All other mentions of the theme of the fable are literary and advance its significance into new territory. Retaining the song from a long-ago deleted section that transgressed the criteria of WP:TRIVIA was borderline at best.
 * 2) Trump was not referring to the fable itself but only to the song and his interpretations are therefore outside the subject of the article, which is about Aesop's fable and not Wilson's derivative use of it.
 * 3) Highlighting Trump's reference to an emotive issue at the height of his campaign tips over into an inappropriate extension of a contemporary debate into an encyclopedic article on a completely different subject. It is therefore covered by the WP:SOAP guidelines.


 * Can you explain why mere mention of the song itself should not be present under something like "Artistic uses" or "In popular culture"? How would that be any different from and ? It's strange to reconsider inclusion of the song's mention "in light of" events in 2016, when this never presented as a problem before it was ever mentioned by Trump. In fact, it was in the article since 2008, predating the mention of the other derivative works. The other works mentioned, as it happens, were largely added by you, so it's a strange conclusion that because you concentrated only on derived literary works, that should retroactively establish that the earlier mentioned work should never have been included for years in the article. The section previously had a more standard Wikipedia article section title of "Modern versions", which you changed to "Later versions" then changed to the narrowed "Variations on a theme", an unusual section title for Wikipedia that appears selected apparently to set in stone your "advance its significance into new territory" criterion above. (The section actually started out as "In popular culture" before being changed by you to "Modern Versions" in 2011, which you suddenly found unsuitable in March 2016.) Why did this Aesop's fable suddenly, in 2016, need a more a narrowed section than the other fables? At the time, did you narrow any other Aesop's Fables articles' "Artistic uses" or "In popular culture sections" sections comparably?
 * As a compromise, a new "In popular culture" or "Artistic uses" section (as countless WP articles contain) would well cover inclusion of the song, as well as the Natural Born Killers reference that you repeatedly (1234) kept deleting whenever various users added it. (A one-person consensus against multiple users?) In such a section, the song needn't be the odd non-literary work, as long as no one makes it the lone non-literary work.
 * Incidentally, I noticed that at some point someone also deleted (without explanation) a reference to the use of the fable in Toni Morrison's Song of Solomon, which I'd argue would also merit a mention in such a new section.
 * &mdash;Undomelin (talk) 02:32, 9 August 2018 (UTC)

Some of the rationale is in the section before this. What happened in the past is not always the best precedent since Wikipedia is an evolving project and the article WP:NOT came considerably after 2008 in order to address concerns arising. That not every article on WP has yet been revised in the light of WP:LINKFARM and WP:NOTEVERYTHING is a poor argument for inclusion. There has been a much longer discussion over at MOS:POPCULT, however, of which you're probably aware. My own reading of all this is that WP is an encyclopaedia, a digest of available knowledge, and therefore to ask in what way concentration on a list of contemporary allusions serves that purpose. Years ago a fellow editor and I also had a discussion on what might might be useful in creating fable articles. I hope that's helpful. Sweetpool50 (talk) 08:18, 9 August 2018 (UTC)