Update on literature workgroup and articles

[Jason Sanford]

Are any literature editors still active in this forum? I haven't seen a lot of posts here lately and wanted to check.

Yesterday I added the lit workgroup tag to all of the top articles, which can now be viewed by going to http://pilot.citizendium.org/wiki/Citizendium_Pilot:Literature_Workgroup and clicking on the "top article" link. I also removed the author articles from the high priority articles page since they now have the lit workgroup tag on them.

Because we're working towards having as many approved and improved articles as possible before CZ's launch, perhaps editors and authors in this workgroup should post an update on their work here, including their plans are in the coming weeks with regards to article improvement. Doing so might give us a feel for how the literature articles are coming along. While we aren't exactly competing with other workgroups, it would be nice to have some approved articles here when we launch (such as the biology article, which was approved a few days ago).

I'll start the updates. During the winter break, I'm planning on finishing up work on the William Shakespeare article. I've already fixed up and added references to the biography and sexuality sections of the article and hope to finish fixing the other sections in the coming weeks.

[Amal Chatterjee]

Hi Jason

Thanks for all the work. I'm still around and have reason to believe the others are too. I agree, let's get cracking. I'll have a more time on my hands from next week so will do my bit.  Question tho', why start a new thread here? Is this basically following on from the discussion on 'Featured Article'?  Just to make life a bit easier for us ...

amal

[Larry Sanger]

"Let's get cracking": OK, folks, how about an approved article or several?  Ah, but I see perhaps we should take this to 'Featured Article'?

[Profrap]

I posted this earlier in the main forum, but I would like to work on making "The Frozen Deep" our first approved article.  The one thing I feel it still needs is a plot summary for the play, but otherwise I think it is a fairly strong candidate for approval.

The reasons I'm proposing this article are:

1)It's an important play, written by Wilkie Collins with considerable input from Charles Dickens.  It's also the play which featured the actress for whom Dickens left his wife, so it's important biographically for Dickens.

2)It's an entirely new article -- there is no entry on the play in WP.

3)I have a good illustration (right now small-sized, but I could link a thumbnail to a higher resolution one) which is securely in the public domain, and which is very little known.

What it needs is a read-through by other Literature editors.

The other possibility, I suppose, is to take a WP article of a more significant work, or a main entry (Charles Dickens, Geoffrey Chaucer) and polish that up to show how we can improve on WP in terms of accuracy and quality of content.  This would require, however, more than one person who specializes in the subject of the article (i.e., another Victorianist or Medievalist).

I also note that one of our editors, Carlos Dews, is a world-class scholar of the works of Carson McCullers.  I haven't seen any postings from him yet, but he could certainly start us off to good purpose by tagging and revising the WP article on McCullers.

RP

[Larry Sanger]

Russell, what I said re Bonny Hicks applies here as well.  Perhaps you could find a reviewer for the Frozen Deep article, invite the person here, and work with him/her toward an approval?  That's just one person...

[Profrap]

Larry,

Here, at least. we may have a bit more luck -- I'm hoping to persuade my friend Paul Lewis, who's a world-class expert on Wilkie Collins and the editor of his complete Letters, to join up and vet the entry on Collins's Frozen Deep!

RP