User:Davemon/Middle-earth

ME project seems to only rely on primary sources:

Reliance on Primary Sources problems

 * Creation of articles like legendarium which are ill-defined in external sources, and so can be used to maskWP:OR.
 * Conceptual WP:BIAS towards
 * Middle-earth treated as being a referent, with articles approaching the definition and description of that referent rather than approaching a literary construction (IMHO this is insulting to JRR Tolkiens achievements as a writer, and CT's as an editor & litereery executor).
 * WP:SYN of primary sources by treating Tolkiens writing as a single body of fiction and deciding on connections which have not been explicitly made by the author.
 * Over-reliance on non-independant sources:
 * CT on 'cannon / legendarium' WP:SYN issues is not independant (however he obviously is on textual history).
 * Tolkien on Tolkien - JRR's Letters are not independant - he often rewrites or constructs narratives - they may be seen as fragmentary texts.
 * Popularist "Tolkien regurgetated" cash-in books - David Day - Compleate Guide to Me etc. have been correctly identified as of little research value - i.e. they just regurgitate rather than add analysis.
 * ICE's MERP books claim to be "official secondary sources". Nobody is using them as such thank goodness! Of course, they do provide some level notability...
 * Lack of Notability WP:NOTE - i.e. outside tolkiens works, many of these things have very little importance, and generally arent mentioned in verifiable 3rd party sources - do they really deserve a place in wikipedia?

Problems with good Tolkien related sources (such as Tolkien Encyclopedia):
 * access / cost
 * Varience in quality of "Tolkien Studies"
 * Too narrow focus - just re-interpeting JRR & CT rather than bringing new contexts?
 * Stem from an almost fannish regard for the author (although I must confess, I do not know if there are "Austen studies", or "Dickens Studies", either way "Literature" or "The Novel" is the proper area of study of such things, not just one author / comparison is deeply important to analysis)

Why secondary & tertiary sources are brilliant
Apart from being required by policy for good reasons - 2nd and 3rd souces are great because they:


 * give the reader new books and articles to go and read about a subject they might have thought was exhausted
 * allow perspectives on a subject that a casual or fannish reader might not have otherwise come across
 * show that it's more than just fanboys/girls and the author that thinks the subjects are interesting in their own right (notability)
 * relate to other discources (modernity, post-modernism, medieval literature, linguistics, pedagogics, literature theory), which might educate the reader?
 * provide a context for the reception of the books
 * why are they so widely popular.
 * why many critics look down on them as juvenile.

why wikiprojects might be a very bad thing
Problems of groupthink, reinforcement behaviours, ostracising / demonising external opinions. The social function of fandom, media-constructed identities,