User:Deborah-jl/childlit

WikiProject on Children's Literature

This is a proposal for a WikiProject to better organise information in articles related to Children's Literature. If you would like to help, add your name to the list at Wikiproject/List of proposed projects, and/or improve this proposal! Feel free to edit this page.

Need for the WikiProject
There are currently a number of problems with the children's literature family of pages.
 * Sources are insufficiently cited on many of the articles
 * The connections between young adult and children's literature are not made clear
 * The criteria for including a book character, location, or other fictional element are not clear, some minor characters have entire articles while notable fictional elements do not
 * Many notable articles have yet to be written, or identified as necessary (eg. notable authors, or important concepts such as Problem novel)
 * Many of the articles are written by children, which -- while it is to be encouraged, in my opnion -- results in less adherence to wikipedia standards, and very little page categorization.

Scope

 * 1) To improve the overall quality of articles relating to children's and young adult literature, books, authors, and theory.
 * 2) To identify those articles which need to be created, merged, or deleted.
 * 3) To improve the categorization of these articles.
 * 4) To define easily maintainable, useable, and well-documented templates and infoboxes for those articles which are likely to have a disproportionate number of child editors (such as articles about authors and books).
 * 5) To improve source citation in all these articles.
 * 6) To propose criteria for (author, book, etc) list creation and inclusion.

Parentage

 * WikiProject Books
 * WikiProject Critical Theory

Relevant articles on Children's Literature

 * Children's Literature
 * Young adult literature
 * Contents of Category:Children's literature and all children.

Projects
Whether this project gets off the ground or not, here's a good place to start listing TODOs for the articles.

Systemic Bias
Right now the children's literature pages are overwhelmingly United States-centric. Even the usage of Category:British children's literature sets up American children's literature as normative, as the categories are currently used. Deborah-jl Talk 16:14, 17 February 2006 (UTC)

Categories
The categories aren't as much of a mess as they could be, but there's still no consensus on what goes in what category. Proposed tree:

Category Chart
- | Children's and Young Adult Literature | -                |                 |     lol |                |                   |                  |           |                |     |                 |                   |                  |           |                |      |                 |                   |                  |           |                |  --   --    --    --   --     |  | Children's |   | Children's |    | Children's |    | Children's |   | Children's |     | | and YA    |   | and YA     |    | and YA     |    | and YA     |   | and YA     |     | | Magazines |   | Book Awards|    | writers    |    | illustators|   | by genre   |     | --  --    --    --   --     |     |                 |                 |                |                     |          |     |                 |                 |                |                     |   articles          articles and       articles and       articles and          | |Children's|  (Cricket,         subcats if         "by nationality"   "by nationality"      | | and YA   |  etc.)             necessary          categories         categories            | |books     | |                  |         |                        |                     |          |            |         |         |                        |                     |          |            |         |         |                        |                     |          article:     |         | -       ---         "Genres"    etc.      | | Picture Books |       | Young Adult |      | Easy Readers |                         | -       ---                               |        |                          |                  |                                   |        |                          |                  |                                   |    articles:                  articles:            articles:                             | Caldecott Medal           Printz Medal         Limited Vocabulary Books             | Picture books             Problem novel                                             | |         -          |                     |                      |                       |          |                     |                      |                       |          |                     |                      |                       |      articles              --         Categories for            --- all the books      | Children's |         books with their          | Fictional   | (subdivisions?     | and YA     |         own cats (eg              | elements of | original language  | Series     |     Category:Alice in Wonderland) | C&amp;YA books  |        or country of       --                                   ---        1st pub?)              |                                               | |                                              |                            articles and categories:                    Also child of                              the series                               Category:Fictional contains child cats, also children of the relevant Fictional subcats.

Chart: Deborah-jl Talk 05:52, 18 February 2006 (UTC)

Discussion: Can we add Middle Grade to the genres? Tem2 18:50, 3 March 2006 (UTC)


 * Definitely! I wonder if that's a US-specific designation, or if other English-speaking countries use it as well.   Deborah-jl Talk 20:57, 3 March 2006 (UTC)
 * I agree that there needs to be a category between 'Children' and 'young adult', but I've no idea what we should be calling it. Certainly 'Middle Grade' is a very US-centric term.  I think that the nearest thing we have in the UK would be 'tweens', but that's a somewhat informal term.  Jenblower 20:49, 2 April 2006 (UTC)
 * Using Google to check common usage... 14,500,000 hits for "children's book", 420,000 hits for "young adult book", 298,000 for "teen book", 80,400 for "middle grade book", and 972 for "tween book".  For whatever that's worth.  Tem2 18:59, 3 April 2006 (UTC)

Discussion
Category:Children's literature is parent of all subcats and contains all articles that don't belong elsewhere.

Category:British children's writers (which has English and Scottish subcats right now) and Category:American children's writers should be subcats of Category:Children's writers. An item should never be in a cat and a parent cat simultaneously, right?

We should CfD Category:British children's literature. Individual books and writers can be British, but children's literature as a whole is not. An article British children's literature might make sense, if it's discussing national specifics of the genre.

Should there be any Young adult literature categories? Some proposed articles, such as Problem novels, would certainly belong in Category:Young adult literature, but I don't think we need to recreate the entire books and writers trees as Category:Young adult books and Category:Young adult writers. It makes sense to leave those under Category:Children's books and Category:Children's writers, no? Right now the Category:Young adult literature contains mostly author and book pages that should probably be recategorized, and, as a sign of how difficult it would be to have separate trees, some, such as Eragon, are published as children's, not YA.

Should we have Category:Children's literature awards, and if so, should it be subdivided nationally? (And, again, do young adult awards come under these cats? I think they should.)  We have at least two awards each listed for the US and the UK.

We need Category:Children's literature series

Deborah-jl Talk 07:13, 10 February 2006 (UTC)

Doh! And of course poetry needs to be on this chart, and graphic novels. Discussions of course come under genre, but do poets come under writers, graphic novelists under writers and/or illustrators depending on whether they write or draw? Graphic novels and poetry collections under books; what about individual poems and, for that matter, short stories? Two child cats under Category:Children's and young adult literature? Deborah-jl Talk 05:56, 18 February 2006 (UTC)

Genres

 * Books
 * Do we distinguish
 * Easy Readers
 * Middle grade books
 * Novels
 * Short story collections
 * Chapter books
 * Etc
 * Poetry Collections
 * Individual Poems?
 * Graphic novels
 * Theorists?

Books
What books get their own articles?
 * Award-winners
 * Best sellers
 * Cult classics
 * Classics
 * Frequently taught books
 * Controverisal books
 * pop culture books

Authors
What authors get their own articles? Probably almost all non-self-published authors, per bio guidelines that specify Published authors, editors, and photographers who have written books with an audience of 5,000 or more or in periodicals with a circulation of 5,000 or more

Fictional characters and place names
Our articles are violating Wikipedia's fictional character notability guidelines all over the place (eg. Daja, Sunset Towers). I think we should do some massive merges of character and place, and then, if the articles get too long, break them out again.

Books
We should use infoboxes. No reason to specialize beyond Template:Infobox Book, I think.

We should make a substitution template, or some easy way for non-knowledgable editors to create good book stubs. Should they be broken out in types such as those in genre, above?

Authors
Any reason not just to encourage use of  ?

Young Adult vs Children's
How should we address the relationship between YA and children's lit?

It's my belief that asking people to distinguish between the two genres is a POV-storm waiting to happen. 80% of what would end up categorised as YA would belong as Children's as well, and a large number of what would get categorised as Children's would be fairly also categorised as YA. I propose -- and I can't believe I'm suggesting this -- renaming the phrase "Children's Literature" in the children's lit categories to "Children's and Young Adult Literature" (or just making a new parent cat), and then having separate categories and articles where appropriate. For example, "Problem Novels" and "Printz Award" could legitimately be in a young adult literature category; "picture books" and "Newbery medal" could legitimately be in a children's literature category. But instead of having separate young adult and children's books categories (right now there's only one, Category:Children's books and its children), just have one parent category Category:Children's and young adult books, and put everything under that tree in order to avoid constant POV-wars and really quite unresolvable discussions about vast numbers of books. Deborah-jl Talk 16:37, 17 February 2006 (UTC)

I'm not understanding what "Problem Novels" are and why they would be exclusive to young adult literature and never children's or adult. I'd put the "Newbery Medal" under a middle grade genre category, but then I'm a newbie to Wikipedia taxonomy. Tem2 19:06, 3 March 2006 (UTC)


 * "Problem novel" is a relatively recent coinage (1960s, I think) for a subgenre of YA that's about The Problems of Being a Teenager. Though some of them are quite good, it was coined as a derogatory term, since they have a reputation for being cookie cutter "plug in your problem here".  Think Luna, the YA novel from a couple of years ago about the girl with the MTF transgendered brother; his problem could have as easily been that he was gay (10 years ago), or doing drugs (15 years ago), or dating a black girl (30 years ago).


 * On the other hand, now that I think of it, Judy Blume books (Blubber, Tiger Eyes) and M. E. Kerr books (Dinky Hocker Shoots Smack!, Deliver us from Evie) are often called problem novels, and those are crossover YA/middle grade in readership. ...Ah, genre definitions, how fuzzy you are.


 * As for the Newbery, I know the ALA's formal guidelines define child as up-to-14, but I think technically the book can be for any age younger than 14. It usually goes to middle grade books, but A Visit to William Blake's Inn, a picture book, won in 1982, and Dear Mr. Henshaw is arguably more of a chapter book than a middle grader.  And now we're back to fuzz.  *sigh* Deborah-jl Talk 20:57, 3 March 2006 (UTC)

Stub completion
There are hundreds of Children's literature stubs, Children's book stubs, and Dr. Seuss book stubs. As pure encyclopedia writing goes, these suckers need filling out. Deborah-jl Talk 03:38, 3 March 2006 (UTC)