Wikipedia:Articles for deletion/List of Emily Dickinson poems


 * The following discussion is an archived debate of the proposed deletion of the article below. Please do not modify it. Subsequent comments should be made on the appropriate discussion page (such as the article's talk page or in a deletion review).  No further edits should be made to this page.

The result was   no consensus. Wizardman 19:05, 17 August 2008 (UTC)

List of Emily Dickinson poems

 * ( [ delete] ) – (View AfD) (View log)

I previously prodded this article, but DGG removed the prod, reasoning that Dickinson "is a sufifciently major author that every one of these poems can probably be the subject of an article." Although I of course do not deny that Dickinson is notable, this particular list serves no purpose and violates WP:NOT. Since its creation, the only article dedicated to one of her more than 1,700 poems has been "Because I could not stop for Death", which is currently a very poor stub. Other articles have seemingly been created, but now exist only as redirects. All of Dickinson's poems, with full text, are available at Wikisource; why should this laundry list of poem titles be kept? María ( habla con migo ) 20:56, 12 August 2008 (UTC)
 * Note: This debate has been included in the list of Lists-related deletion discussions.   — Cliff smith  talk  22:23, 12 August 2008 (UTC)
 * Delete as per nom. I was going to say transwiki, but evidently the material is already available. RayAYang (talk) 21:25, 12 August 2008 (UTC)
 * Comment. I'm not sure which way to go on this. The fact is we have plenty of bibliographical lists -- and of notable enough authors that WP:OTHERCRAPEXISTS really isn't appropriate. In some respects, prohibiting Dickinson from being the subject of a bibliographical list of this nature violates WP:NPOV because it's biased against a genre of writing that, by its very nature, is more prolific than that of novelists. On the other hand, as stated above, it is little more than a laundry list as it presently exists. At the very least it needs to be split up as format-wise it's pretty useless right now. 23skidoo (talk) 21:31, 12 August 2008 (UTC)
 * I see your point, but I can't say I'm familiar with a systematic bias against poet bibliographies. Can you point to previous AFDs like this (just out of curiosity)?  I'm less concerned with Dickinson's prolific poetry, however, and more concerned with the lack of encyclopedic value.  An article dedicated to the different collections of Dickinson's poetry might have some encyclopedic value because her published poetry has evolved over time from editor to editor, it's still not known exactly how she intended her poetry to appear, etc, etc.  But a list of merely titles?  For now I think a link to Wikisource from the main article is sufficient.  María ( habla  con migo ) 21:40, 12 August 2008 (UTC)


 * Keep. -- Nom says "this ... list serves no purpose and violates WP:NOT" but I disagree; I think Emily Dickinson's poems are notable. And if they're notable individually, then a list of them is potentially useful, notable, and highly encyclopaedic. -- The other arguments are all grounds for editing but not deletion.  I'd also draw your attention to WP:DEMOLISH.-- S Marshall   Talk / Cont  23:22, 12 August 2008 (UTC)
 * Of course the poems are notable; that's why the Dickinson article spends so much bloody time discussing them, right? :) However, how is this article useful when it points nowhere?  How does it serve any kind of encyclopedic purpose?  The ED article doesn't even link to it because it's unnecessary.  This article is a laundry list of titles.  Were it an article about the poems, I would agree with you, but that certainly isn't the case.  María ( habla  con migo ) 00:01, 13 August 2008 (UTC)


 * Delete. The list is not encyclopedia material but rather, effectively, a table of contents.  It does nothing to help to inform readers about Dickinson, and runs afoul of the basic principle that Wikipedia is not an indiscriminate collection of information.  It is also surely false that each of Dickinson's poems is worthy  of an article of its own (even in principle, disregarding the unlikeliness that anyone will write all those articles) -- this idea, if put into practice, would run far afoul of WP:NOR, as the great majority of the poems (beyond the few most famous ones) do not have enough of an existing critical history for anything much non-OR to be said about them. -- Rbellin|Talk 00:15, 13 August 2008 (UTC)
 * Comment. This may well be a highly useful page.  However, only some, not all, of Emily Dickinson's poems are ever going to have encyclopedia articles; my understanding is that she wrote almost 2000 of them.  An index of her poems would appear to be Wikisource material rather than for here. - Smerdis of Tlön (talk) 14:00, 13 August 2008 (UTC)
 * Keep Ideally it should be merged into the main Emily Dickinson article, but it doesn't take more than a quick glance to see that it's far too long for that, so the only real choice is to keep it in its own seperate list article. I don't see anything in WP:NOT that applies to the article in question; if you're going to point to a long policy list like that as your only deletion justification, I'd prefer that you actually bother to explain what part of the policy the article violates. The article could be better utilized, true, but that's not nearly enough to justify deletion. Gelmax (talk) 19:38, 13 August 2008 (UTC)
 * Sorry, I should have been more clear. I've pointed in part to WP:LAUNDRY as a reason for deletion, but really I would say that this article violates WP:IINFO in that Wikipedia is not an indiscriminate collection of information.  90% of the poems listed also violate WP:N in that they are not notable by themselves and have not received scholarly attention.  In truth, a majority of Dickinson's poetry is notable as a whole, not separately.  As lists are typically used for index purposes, I still fail to see how this article in particular serves that purpose when nothing links to it or will likely ever link to it in its current form.  And please, gods of AFD, don't merge this into ED's article!  María ( habla  con migo ) 19:49, 13 August 2008 (UTC)


 * Keep and expandThis is one of the authors where every individual poem is probably notable enough for an article--there is  certainly published criticism on every one of them. There are far too many for them to be discussed in one general article, and, unlike, almost all equally important poets, she did not publish them in conveniently packaged portions--she wrote them all separately, and they were almost all of them published together for the first time after her death.   It's just a matter of interested people doing the work.  This article should be seen not as a finished work, but as a stand in until they've been written, after which it will serve as a navigational device.  The article is in process of leading somewhere. Let's not destroy the framework. DGG (talk) 19:42, 13 August 2008 (UTC)
 * "The framework" has been in place for more than three years now and little has been done to improve it. Rather than detailing how this article can be improved, what you are suggesting is the creation of hundreds of stubs dedicated to individual poems, most of which have not received scholarly study btw, in order to justify the presence of one bloated and unnecessary laundry list of titles and an archaic numbering format.  Do you volunteer for the job? :)  María ( habla  con migo ) 19:57, 13 August 2008 (UTC)


 * Comment To me, this appears to be WP:COPYVIO, copied straight from an index of a book by Thomas H. Johnson (the article about Ms. Dickinson, calling him "Johnston"). Mandsford (talk) 20:46, 13 August 2008 (UTC)
 * Comment. I don't believe that lists that could be compiled mechanically from public domain information can be subjects of copyright, at least not under US law; the telephone book doctrine, described in a US Supreme Court case I could look up, sees to that. - Smerdis of Tlön (talk) 14:32, 14 August 2008 (UTC)
 * The point is that Johnson's edition, the one the listed versions appear to be taken from, based on punctuation (and like Franklin's, one of only two editions of Dickinson with any claim to completeness) is not in the public domain; it is a copyrighted work. The list may well be a copyvio, unless we think it's fair use. -- Rbellin|Talk 16:41, 14 August 2008 (UTC)


 * Keep as notable, encyclopaedic, and able to be improved. Just because the individual poems might not be notable together, they are notable as a group. Erik the Red  2 ( AVE · CAESAR ) 19:19, 14 August 2008 (UTC)
 * Again, no one has explained how a mere list of titles connected to an archaic numeral system from more than fifty years ago is encyclopedic. This article serves no purpose; it's not even a proper summary of the magnitude Dickinson's work.  I don't think it's capable of doing so.  I dislike repeating myself, but I don't see how this list can possibly be improved.  Only about twenty-or-so of Dickinson's poems are notable enough to possibly warrant articles.  María ( habla  con migo ) 19:35, 14 August 2008 (UTC)


 * The above discussion is preserved as an archive of the debate. Please do not modify it. Subsequent comments should be made on the appropriate discussion page (such as the article's talk page or in a deletion review). No further edits should be made to this page.