Talk:Weela Weela Walya

Re-write and move
This version of the article is full of inaccuracies and dubious facts. The most significant error is that it says that the song was catalogued in Child's Ballads (it even cites the pages it's supposed to be on), when in fact that book makes no mention of it. What's worse, this is repeated on many web pages that are returned by a Google search. This, and some of the other facts, originally came from some blog page that is now long dead, but most of the facts ("The song is a reference to famine time practices") are completely unsourced. I am re-writing the article from scratch. I'm also moving it from "The River Saile" to "Weela Weela Walya", the name it has in the Roud catalogue. I have never heard it named as "The River Saile", and it doesn't appear under that name on any album. Scolaire (talk) 07:59, 20 March 2017 (UTC)

Recent move
moved this article to with the edit summary "". He/she gave no indication of why they thought the spelling was wrong or why their version was right. There are, of course, multiple spellings of the title. As I explained in the section above this one, "Weela Weela Walya" is the name it has in the Roud catalogue. Therefore it is the closest we have to an authoritative spelling. The article should not be moved unless the mover first obtains a consensus here on the talk page. Scolaire (talk) 13:30, 6 November 2020 (UTC)
 * if that is how Roud has it, then... I guess we should leave it so, though it’s not how I’ve seen it spelt. User:Kafka Liz a girl is no one 00:14, 22 November 2020 (UTC)

Comedic
Added a cn, despite my dislike of such tags, because I don’t see how the word fits. Nothing funny happens in the song, and the whole thing seems more matter-of-fact than making light. I’m wondering if we can get some more sources, round this out, and not have the majority of the article be just song lyrics. User:Kafka Liz a girl is no one 00:18, 22 November 2020 (UTC)


 * said "comic". Somewhere along the way that was changed to "comedic", which presumably somebody thought was more grammatical, but which is further away from what I intended. What I really wanted to convey was that it was told in a "fun" way. It's a gruesome story, but not meant to inspire fear or shock or sadness. It's sung for a laugh. When I was young, I heard several versions with comical verses added, e.g. "She put the babby in the bin" followed by "The binmen all went out on strike", or "They took her off and she go' hung / The rope went up and she went bedung!" Unfortunately, "fun" is not an encyclopedic word. "Light-hearted" might be better, or maybe you could suggest an alternative phrasing. Unfortunately, also, I haven't succeeded in finding any more or better sources in the three and a half years since I did that edit. Like you, I dislike "cn" and other such tags, so could I ask you to please remove it, regardless of the outcome of this discussion? If sources can't be found, the tag won't make them magically appear. Scolaire (talk) 15:59, 23 November 2020 (UTC)
 * Thank you for answering. I’ll remove the tag - and think about how to phrase this. Edit to add: see this is already done.User:Kafka Liz a girl is no one 15:06, 28 November 2020 (UTC)