User talk:Poetry centric

Poetry Lovers.

 * Hi Poetry centric, thank you for your message. I removed the Poetry Lovers website from Alexander Blok because there already many translations of his poems posted in the external links and also the PL website doesn't say anything about the organisation running it. It looks like a privately published website run by an enthusiastic translator. There are many thousand of these types of poetry sites out there. So as to use strong, official sources re WP:RS and WP:EL we try and use recognised sites and translators. I am in the midst of trying to cleanup Blok, Akhmatova, Brodsky and Tsvetaeva; trying to use strong sources. I'm happy to discuss this further. Best wishes Span (talk) 21:52, 4 November 2010 (UTC)

Dear Spanglej,

First of all thank you for taking your time to reply and investigate the issue further. I believe the work you are doing is important and necessary and I applaud you for your efforts.

Having said that, below are some highlights of why I still think you should not remove links to Poetry Lovers’ Page (PLP) from Wikipidia entries of Russian poets, such as Alexander Blok.

You might not agree personally with each single argument below, however collectively these arguments should provide a strong case of PLP’s reputation and respect levels.

1. If you search in Google for “Yevgeny Bonver” -site:poetryloverspage.com you will see that over 300 websites (other than poetryloverspage.com) are directly referencing Yevgeny Bonver’s translations which are hosted on poetryloverspage.com.

2. Some of the Links to Yevgeny Bonver’s translation posted on Wekipedia have been around for years.

3. PLP is a trusted source to many home schooling sites.

4. PLP is bookmarked in Delicious, stumble upon, and digg, among others.

5. PLP is listed first in many search engines (Bing, Yahoo, etc.) when searching for “poet_first_name poet_last_name poems”, including the majority of the Russian poets whose translations are published on PLP.

6. PLP carries significantly more translations than the other websites currently listed in the external link section in Wikipedia. For example under Alexander Blok PLP has over three dozen of original and unique translations published so far while the other links provide about a dozen, collectively. By not listing this website you are denying the English speaking world of free and public access to Alexander Blok’s poetry.

To add, to this point, PLP is the official website that hosts Yevgeny Bonver’s translations. PLP does not re-publish translations of Russian poetry found on other websites, or previously published anywhere else – it only features content that cannot be found anywhere else. For example, if you stumble upon any one of the translations from PLP’s Russian Poets section anywhere else on the Internet, and there is no link back to PLP, it means the owners of the site in question have not obtained a proper permission from PLP to publish these translations, and are hosting them illegally.

7. Having said all the above, for comparison purposes I argue that PLP website has significantly more credibility than some of other links, such as the second listing http://max.mmlc.northwestern.edu/~mdenner/ which is simply a resource hosted in someone’s home directory at a university. As you might well know home directories are temporary while the person works/studies at that university and rarely can be considered as reliable stable and permanent resource. In comparison PLP has been a trusted resource since 1995.

As I mentioned at the beginning of this message these are just highlights. If you are still not convinced and require additional details, let us take this conversation offline and continue via email. For this purpose please feel free to contact me via PLP Contact Us form http://www.poetryloverspage.com/contact_us.html

Regards, Poetry_Centric —Preceding unsigned comment added by Poetry centric (talk • contribs) 05:06, 5 November 2010 (UTC)


 * Thank you for your message. I would have a look at the conflict of interest guideline. It seems that you are promoting an organisation that you are involved with. External links guidelines state: "You should avoid linking to a site that you own, maintain, or represent". Best wishes Span (talk) 09:36, 5 November 2010 (UTC)