Talk:Richard Dawkins/Works/The God Delusion

Name

The naming of this article does bring up some questions about how to name articles that are titles of books. Maybe the Editor in Chief could chime in. --Matt Innis (Talk) 19:19, 11 November 2007 (CST)

This has come up in other guises too, not only books. My view is that we cannot have book titles as encyclopedia entries, otherwise it is cluttering and confusing. On the other hand, we can have articles which deal with a topic [which might also be the title of a book]. Given that the God Delusion appears to be a thesis specific to one book by Dawkins, then it should not be an article in its own right because it is really a book review. So, where should book reviews go? Do we allow them? --Martin Baldwin-Edwards 19:25, 11 November 2007 (CST)

I'm no librarian by any means, but maybe book reviews should be subpages of articles about the author. So maybe this one would be Richard Dawkins/The God Delusion and listed under Richard Dawkins/Catalogs. Once we figure it out, we need to put it in the CZ:Naming Conventions guidelines. I'll keep an eye here for a little while. --Matt Innis (Talk) 19:42, 11 November 2007 (CST)

I agree this is what subpages should be used for. Wouldn't bibliographies be the correct place for it? We could always have it as a sub-subpage of bibliographies, similar to the cuisine catalogs. The idea would be to click on the bliblographies subpage for all publications and then click on the sub-subpage link for the review. Make sense? Chris Day (talk) 20:29, 11 November 2007 (CST)

Yes, to all of this. --Martin Baldwin-Edwards 20:47, 11 November 2007 (CST)

Alright I moved every thing to a state as i described above. I assume this is preferable? Chris Day (talk) 20:54, 11 November 2007 (CST)

Well, this is interesting, but I think it needs more discussion than the above. Does this mean that every article about every work of art, and every writing, will live on a subpage? Just think of any of Shakespeare's plays, or Plato's Republic, or Moby Dick. Surely these will not live on subpages; after all, each of them will require their own subpages.

There is one thing that is not considered in the above, and that is that subpages aren't for collaborative encyclopedia articles--they are for ancillary, supplementary types of information. If we go down the road of having collaborative encyclopedia articles on subpages, we have to distinguish the general grounds on which we might want to distinguish the articles that live on subpages from regular articles. I'm not sure that can be done coherently.

I do agree, however, that article titles that simply repeat the titles of creative works will, in many cases, look very strange. My solution is the same sort of solution we use to contextualize any title, namely parenthetical disambiguation: The God Delusion (book). We already do this in many cases. I wouldn't see anything wrong with doing it in all cases, except, perhaps, some of the best-known works (Romeo and Juliet)--and maybe, just for the sake of consistency, even in those cases as well.

I don't mean to "lay down the law" here folks, I just think that you haven't looked at all the relevant angles. --Larry Sanger 22:15, 11 November 2007 (CST)

But sometimes the best way to start a discussion is to have the example at hand. This experiment is the only example in CZ at present, as far as I'm aware. Chris Day (talk) 22:24, 11 November 2007 (CST)

in my opinion the article is about the ideas of Dawkins--not the book itself. (An article on the Gutenberg Bible would be about a book). Article does not NOT attend to the publisher, binding, sales, reprints, changing editions etc. This is a normal situation regarding intellectual history and the material should all be in the biographical article on Dawkins, I suggest.Richard Jensen 22:28, 11 November 2007 (CST)

Larry, you wrote "Surely these will not live on subpages; after all, each of them will require their own subpages". Yes, that would be the point each book on its own subpage. The question here is how many books are worthy of their own article? Richard mentions one good example above. We already have discography subpages, for albums, are they not similar with respect to works? Why distinguish a record from a book? Chris Day (talk) 22:30, 11 November 2007 (CST)

Larry stated above: "There is one thing that is not considered in the above, and that is that subpages aren't for collaborative encyclopedia articles--they are for ancillary, supplementary types of information. If we go down the road of having collaborative encyclopedia articles on subpages, we have to distinguish the general grounds on which we might want to distinguish the articles that live on subpages from regular articles. I'm not sure that can be done coherently."

We should put that in the subpage instructions. I think I have some collaborations in the Chiropractic cluster. --Matt Innis (Talk) 22:37, 11 November 2007 (CST)

Let's move this discussion to the forums. I have started a thread at the link here. Chris Day (talk) 23:55, 11 November 2007 (CST)