User talk:Chessw

Hi,

I saw your edit to Swinburne, and comments thereon. I'll copyedit it (if someone else doesn't do it first) as soon as I've finished my tax return! Your knowledge of the subject is obviously greater than mine. As for catching vandalisms, the way it works for me (and I suspect many others) is that we all have a number of pages that are marked as being "watched"; if dodgy looking edits occur (such as those from people without usernames), we have a look and revert of necessary. It's not perfect, and someone subtle and clever enough could subvert a few pages and gull not only the casual but also the experienced; but the weight of thousands of people constantly looking tends to ensure that blatant nonsense doesn't stay in for long. Any queries, drop me a line on my talk page User talk:Djnjwd.

Djnjwd 18:43, 29 Jan 2005 (UTC)

I've done a basic wikification of Swinburne, without changing your comments; you may well find that others do change them and tone dowm your enthusiasm, as not being sufficiently NPOV. But I'll leave the NPOV'ing to the consensus of those that read it.

Djnjwd 23:24, 29 Jan 2005 (UTC)#

Hi, glad to help; NPOV stands for Neutral Point of View and is an aspiration of the Wikipedia. Have a look at these pages:

What wikipedia is

What Wikipedia is not

PS You can sign your name on talk pages by using 4 tildes

Djnjwd 10:16, 30 Jan 2005 (UTC)

I read the pages you recommended and I got the idea, but I'm amazed at how well this whole thing works, and I suspect some powerful staffing is going on somewhere. Otherwise a raid by people from some particular school of thought would be irresistible, I should think. I'm going now to see, for example, if the Darwin article is neutral-Darwinian or neutral-fundamentalist. The speed with which I got my article edited is impressive, too.

Without being too too philosophical, I suggest that genuine neutrality is impossible, and that consensus is, precisely, an agreement on a non-neutral position.

I'm now going to sign with four tildes and see if it works.

Chessw 18:34, 30 Jan 2005 (UTC)chessw

(Me again) I'm sure you're right that genuine neutrality is an aspiration rather than a reality (but it is an aspiration), and that what we broadly have is what you might call a consensus. But there really isn't a system of "powerful staffing", as you put it, going on. There are sysops, to whom one call appeal, and who have the ability to impose bans on users hell-bent on vandalizing the system. But by and large the system is self-policing. Anyway, it's hoped you'll stick around long enough to contribute and see.

Djnjwd 23:24, 30 Jan 2005 (UTC)

Well, I could talk about Swinburne all week, and I hope we soon get some third party to take you off the reply-hook here. I just checked the Viking Portable VICTORIAN AND EDWARDIAN POETS, the fifth volume of a good "neutral" five-volume anthology of English and American verse. I find that Swinburne gets 38 pages, 20 of them from ATALANTA and POEMS AND BALLADS FIRST SERIES. By comparison, Whitman gets 46 pages, Matthew Arnold 45, Dante Gabriel Rossetti 24, Emily Dickinson (much shorter poems for her, of course) 13, and Gerard Manley Hopkins 20 including Hopkins' ten-pager, "Wreck of the DEUTSCHLAND."

This is an anthology from 1950, when Swinburne's rep was about as low as it is today. It also confirms my contention that ATALANTA and P & B FIRST SERIES never lost their critical esteem in any significant way. Swinburne SEEMS to have lost more than he has because his reputation, throughout his lifetime, was so high. T. S. Eliot, in the 1920s, devoted an essay or two to denigrating Swinburne, which of course he wouldn't have done if Swinburne didn't have a big influence -- an influence, by the way, which stood in the way of Eliot's own brand of poetry.

I'm not saying that Eliot was wrong or unfair (for an advocate he was scrupulously fair), but once Swinburne was reduced to the rank of an important minor poet, people got the impression that he'd been made to vanish entirely. Chessw 23:54, 30 Jan 2005 (UTC)chessw