User:Phil wink/Sonnet Uniformity Act



The Sonnet Uniformity Act presents the vision of a single opinionated editor on ways to improve the standing of the 154 individual articles for Shakespeare's Sonnets (but does not, in fact, treat the article Shakespeare's sonnets). It does not necessarily reflect consensus, and no one is obliged to follow it. But it is the only systematic discussion I am aware of on this topic. I hope these ideas will become standards... or provoke you to come up with better ones. Either way, Wikipedia wins.

Overview
This Act deals chiefly with systemic features applicable to all 154 articles. Its underlying assumption is that the Sonnets should present a professional and unified front. Of course variation must be allowed in individual cases, but they should all exhibit the same basic structure and features — they should all be orderly little chapters of the same book. It is natural for content editors to focus primarily on the article in front of them. Even systematic improvements (for example those by, , , , , and myself ... apologies to those I've missed) mostly occur without much documentation of rationale for future editors to follow or critique. My hope is that this Act will provide a nexus of discussion and documentation.

As for models, the Sonnet articles vary greatly in content and quality, but by and large they are a sorry lot. There are currently (March 2016) 3 Sonnets assessed as Good:, , and. These will provide the strongest guidance, but this guidance need not be decisive.

Text
Currently every article is adorned with the Sonnet template, and these are in a good state. Some notes about their text content:

In the past, Sonnet texts were not unified, and seldom cited.
 * The only cited texts were a handful from Katherine Duncan-Jones's Arden 3 edition. Fair use may have allowed for this copyrighted text, but if we were to use it uniformly, then Wikipedia would be quoting the entire edited text of the Arden 3 edition — far beyond any fair use rationale.
 * In a few cases, we provided old-spelling transcriptions of the original text of 1609 — the only text with any claim to be definitive. But the small minority of readers who might find this more useful than off-putting will easily find it elsewhere. Moreover, the presence of images from the Quarto replaces some of the utility of these texts.
 * The majority of texts were uncited but (I suspect) taken from either Jeremy Hylton's The Complete Works of William Shakespeare or Eric M. Johnson's Open Source Shakespeare. These editions derive ultimately from the famous Globe edition (Clark & Wright 1864). But these electronic editions are three removes from their scholarly source, and in fact their Wikipedia texts had been altered over the years, so they were a hodge-podge.

All Wikipedia's Sonnet texts now (March 2016) come from one cited public domain modernized scholarly critical edition:

The Arden Shakespeare [1st series] editions are respected in their own right, and this happens to be the most recent major edition of the Sonnets which has fallen into the public domain.

The Sonnet text should appear once in the template of each article. Subsequent quotes of words, phrases, and even a line or two will be necessary and often frequent — but the article should not, for example, re-quote an entire quatrain even for a section devoted to that quatrain. Occasionally, some analysis may depend upon a particular spelling, punctuation, or variant that is not present in the selected display text. Obviously in these cases, the appropriate bit of the germane edition should be quoted and cited in the article, but this would not justify altering or replacing the main display text.

Heading structure
The heading structure of the 3 GA articles is almost identical. After the Sonnet template and the lead paragraph, there is:

Paraphrase     18 86 102 Structure      18 86 102 Context        18 86 102 Exegesis       18 86 102 Overview         86 102 Quatrain 1       86 102 Quatrain 2       86 102 Quatrain 3       86 102 Couplet          86 102 In music       18 Notes          18 References     18 86 102 Further reading   86 102 External links 18    102

This will be a good base, but unsurprisingly I'll have a bit to say about these sections below:

Synopsis
I hate ... HATE paraphrases. When I see them all I can think is, "since you're too dumb to read a good poem by Shakespeare, here, read this crap poem by me." Yet inexperienced readers need (and deserve) a way in. I think there can be a way in that avoids the vices of a sonnet's-worth of paraphrase. Consider this test case:

 The Speaker assures a young man that accusations against him do not actually harm him, because beauty is always a target ("mark") for slander.  In fact, slander only verifies the worth of the good, as it seeks to be attached to the very best, as (the Speaker claims) the young man is.  The young man has made it this far, either avoiding or triumphing over vice, yet this praise is insufficient to "tie up envy", which always increases.  "[I]f a hint or suspicion of badness did not disguise your true appearance, entire nations would be in thrall to you."
 * Synopsis for Sonnet 70

This format allows glosses, brief quotes, and targeted paraphrases (all exemplified here), but positions them as elements of 4 little connected and labeled prose summaries. Brief context not literally in the text ("The Speaker assures a young man...") can find a place if useful, and not every phrase needs to be slavishly sterilized in order (especially those which are reasonably clear on their own), while both glosses and the original word they're glossing can helpfully sit side-by-side. Gone are paraphrases that are arranged in bad free verse lines, or remain awkward English because they meticulously follow phrase by phrase, or lose all shape because they fall into an undifferentiated prose paragraph, or maintain awkward second-person pronouns despite being written by an Editor to a Reader rather than by Shakespeare to a Fair Youth.

The wikicode used is:



Note that, since Wikipedia replaces a single newline with a space on the same line, each section can be placed on its own line in the code, while still forming 1 paragraph in display.

Structure
Currently, I'm favoring this language as an intro:

Sonnet [X] is an English or Shakespearean sonnet. The English sonnet has three quatrains, followed by a final rhyming couplet. It follows the typical rhyme scheme of the form, abab cdcd efef gg and is composed in iambic pentameter, a type of poetic metre based on five pairs of metrically weak/strong syllabic positions. The [Y]th line exemplifies a regular iambic pentameter:

Followed by a scansion of the most unambiguous regular pentameter afforded by the sonnet, with (sonnet #, line #) as:

 ×   /    ×  /  ×   /       ×   /  ×   / Shall hate be fairer lodged than gentle love? (10.10)
 * / = ictus, a metrically strong syllabic position. × = nonictus. (×) = extrametrical syllable.

The markup is:


 * scansion
 * verse text
 * verse text

(For reference, my initial discussion of scansion for the Sonnets is posted at Wikipedia talk:WikiProject Shakespeare/Archive 5.)

What follows can vary by sonnet. I've included additional lines that exhibit common or rare metrical variants, or words with alternative pronunciations demanded by the meter. Others may highlight other key structural topics, though my feeling is that most other discussions of structure will edge toward literary criticism and fit best in Analysis below. The 3 poems with noncanonical structure will need special expansion.

Context
This section should probably be defined somewhat narrowly. Anything more properly covered in William Shakespeare or Shakespeare's sonnets or similar articles, should only be briefly noted and linked. We don't need 126 complete discussions of who W. H. is.

Appropriate to this section are recognized connections with other sonnets, its place in a series, subseries, or "diptych". Also possibly connections to other works of Shakespeare, and hypothetical references to actual events.

Analysis
This section (named Exegesis in many articles) should be named Analysis. First, the word will be comprehensible to many more readers (and not carry the negative association "Criticism" will have to some). Also, I think "analysis" is a bit broader and will be a better universal term for the types of material we may want to put here. Although I think the model of Sonnets 86 & 102, having the subsections:


 * Quatrain 1
 * Quatrain 2
 * Quatrain 3
 * Couplet

... is a good one, and will probably be germane to many articles, I also think this section needs to be flexible enough to accommodate whatever flow editors require and their sources suggest. So I wish to be uncharacteristically undogmatic about what happens within the Analysis section.

Cultural references
The place of the current In music should be superseded by the heading Cultural references, of which "In music" might be a subheading. The problem of what to allow here, or whether to allow the section at all, is a knotty one, and is broached at MOS:CULTURALREFS. At a minimum we can say that this section is not required in a quality article.

Notes and references
The style and disposition of citations, references, notes, bibliographies, and what have you, is notoriously various on Wikipedia, and even the 3 Good Sonnet articles are not uniform. Whatever styles are decided upon, vast cleanup is required to bring all 154 articles into line. I assert that:


 * 1) The Sonnet articles will use inline citations. By default, these would be  and, if a single citation is used multiple times, .
 * 2) When a source is important or frequently-used in an article, I strongly advocate the use of short citations (e.g. Atkins 2007, p. 379.) + the full citation, just once, below in a second section. This greatly eases source code editing, and reduces the chance of typographical errors. However, I'm leaning toward advocating sfn as the standard short inline reference. Comments are welcome. Naturally either short method can be supplemented by full citations in  where the source is more tangential or cited only once.
 * 3) Both for long inline citations, and for full bibliographical citations, Citation Style 1 is preferred — that is, the suite of templates: cite book, cite journal, cite web, etc. I've updated Sonnet 11 to provide a test case for sfn use. ( & )
 * 4) I have placed Shakespeare sonnets bibliography in each article. The rationale can be found on its talk page. As noted there, the combination of this template + short citations presents a possible problem, but I believe the benefits outweigh the drawbacks.
 * 5) As for heading structure, my preference is that used in :
 * (parameters, if needed, can be applied on an article-by-article basis)
 * ...followed by...
 * Full citations germane to the article, not already included in...
 * Full citations germane to the article, not already included in...
 * Full citations germane to the article, not already included in...

Priority articles
Obviously, editors can work on any article they choose. But in my view, work on some articles will yield more bang for the buck. While some Sonnet articles still have virtually no content, I do not believe these are necessarily the pages most in need of attention. I have compiled 2 "wish lists" of priorities to which I would like to direct editors.

Assignments
A number of Sonnet articles have been the target of recent classroom assignments. These are now amongst the longer Sonnet articles, and often have quite a few citations. Most have been nominated for GA status … here is a sampling of the reviews:


 * 25 "Since the article has no inline citations, I am automatically failing the nomination. On another note, this is lacking commentary from critics/scholars for what they liked/disliked about this piece."
 * 56 "Quite a lot of the article's text seems to have been copied verbatim, or closely paraphrased, from its sources; the prose seems somewhat slapdash, in some places to the point of incomprehension; and on several key points the article's writers appear to have failed to understand what their sources are saying (even to the degree of claiming the exact opposite of what the source says). The level of precision in the citations is also somewhat arbitrary, with misspelled author names, missing identifiers, and incorrect page numbers."
 * 81 "The prose is choppy; there is a lot of material swallowed whole from fringe websites, and sources appear to be chosen for easy copy/paste-ability; and the coverage of the subject is spotty and narrow."

After GA nomination, generally no improvements have been made by the nominators, and all but 2 ( and ) have failed. Because these are among the longer Sonnet articles, and often have a fair number of citations, they give the superficial appearance of good encyclopedic content. These articles need to be aggressively re-written, with less than the usual deference toward existing cited statements. The sonnets in question (and that therefore constitute my first "wish list") are:


 * 8 • 11 • 13 • 14 • 23 • 25 • 28 • 30 • 41 • 56 • 72 • 81 • 101 • 110 • 129 • 138 • 141 • 147. All are GA fails except 138 which was not nominated.

Most viewed
Another criterion with which to choose priority might be traffic. The most-viewed Sonnet articles (as of this writing) are, from 559/day to 25/day:


 * 18 • 116 • 130 • 73 • 29 • 30 • 20 • 1 • 138 • 55 • 141 • 43 • 12 • 60 • 129 • 19 • 57 • 154 • 147

Since 18 is already a GA, the priority list effectively begins with 116.


 * In both lists
 * 30, 129, 141, 147