Talk:Travels With Charley: In Search of America

From Wikibooks, the open-content textbooks collection

This page was previously nominated for deletion, but was kept. Please see the discussion in the Wikibooks:Requests for deletion archives for justifications and discussion. Old discussions should be taken into account before nominating again for deletion.

Note, this is a good thing. It means that a new vote to delete this content must overcome the justifications for why this page was kept, which BTW didn't have a single delete vote. It certainly should not be speedy deleted ever again. --Rob Horning 02:46, 14 April 2006 (UTC)

[edit] Early page discussion

Just a note: Please don't use Wikibooks as an escape hatch to run from dealing with editorial issues on Wikipedia. This is not the best way to fight these kind of fights, and a good way to get content like this deleted.

You may be the original author of this text, so prove it to Wikipedia editors. Don't go dumping it here on Wikibooks instead. This is clearly an encyclopedia article and not a book, so do the fight on Wikipedia instead. Also, please try to resolve the copyright issues on Wikipedia first, and then review WB:WIN to make sure the content is needed here. Some Wikipedia content has been allowed on Wikibooks under limited situations, or if it is deleted from Wikipedia because it violates some standard that it is not encyclopedic, like a bunch of cookbook recepies or a How-to manual that was started on Wikipedia instead of Wikibooks.

Some literary study guides have been started on Wikibooks, but you should be prepared to make it a substantial book-length work if you really want it to stay here. Please look at Muggles' Guide to Harry Potter for an excellent example of how this has been done. I'm not expecting really elaborate treatment of what you have done here, but it is more than a few extra paragraphs of new content. --Rob Horning 18:22, 6 April 2006 (UTC)

Wikibooks is for educational "textbooks" and study guides. This is a study guide. The teacher who made this content did so for a class and for classroom study and for class test taking purposes. This is not an encyclopedia article, unless it was radically altered. you should be prepared to make it a substantial book-length work - not really, look at the other study guides on Wikibooks, no one is beholden to create a book length work. Muggle's is an excellent example, but not everyone has the time to personally do that, consider this a "stub" that other people can build on. Frankly the fact that came it from Wikipedia is irrelevant, and it was only on Wikipedia for less than a hour. It was moved here because this is the appropriate project for educational study guides, which is what this was created as, and for, by a teacher, for his/her class. -- Stbalbach 21:31, 6 April 2006 (UTC)

[edit] Study guide, not encyclopedia

Most of this was written by a "newbie", a K-12 teacher in NJ, with no experience on Wikipedia or Wikibooks. Rather than delete things, we need to be kind to newbies, and direct them how to conform to the standards.

This is a study guide and not an encyclopedia article.

Rationale:

1. The lead section (2 paragraphs) is copied from Wikipedia because it provides context and background for the book, so ignore that. Delete or rewrite the lead if you want.
2. The "summaries", while they do summarize parts of the book, do so for didactic reasons to educate the reader. It is much too specific and lengthy for Wikipedia, these are specific passages quoted and commented upon for educational reasons, for the reader to ask themselves questions, thematic concerns, focusing on specific issues deemed important.
3. There are "Reading Guide Questions" at the end of each section designed to further educate the reader on the questions focused on in the summaries.

And BTW this could be adapted to Wikipedia standards with some work (I very well might do that), but it would no longer be a study guide, which is what the original author intended and wanted.

If this is not a Study Guide, I don't know what is. While it may not conform to exactly what other study guides look like on Wikibooks, that is a matter of style and further development, which can be changed and worked on. The biggest reason it is a study guide is because it was written to be a study guide by a teacher for a classroom setting for test preparation purposes. --Stbalbach 22:00, 6 April 2006 (UTC)

[edit] Supporting "policies and guidelines"

From Wikibooks:Policies and guidelines:

Wikibooks is an instructional resource:

The site should primarily be used for developing textbooks, textbook-like books, and supporting book-based instructional materials (i.e. annotated texts such as an the Works of Shakespeare with aids for reading and study, for example, or extensive book summaries).

From Wikibooks:What is Wikibooks

Wikibooks includes books based on Wikipedia articles

Note that "based on" does not mean "verbatim copies of". Wikipedia articles sometimes have a tendency to get rather long, and Wikipedia editors have a tendency to trim them down to a limit of around 32k of text. When this happens, it is permitted to fork such content from Wikipedia, provided the content is reformatted as a book, as per Wikibooks:Naming policy, and the Wikipedia entry is clearly marked to indicate that this fork now exists on this site, and further content should be added to the book, and not the Wikipedia article. When forking content from Wikipedia, you should correct any links which previously pointed to other Wikipedia articles so that they continue to point to those same articles, and not to non-existent articles on the Wikibooks site.

---

Considering that I wrote (well, helped establish and worked with the wording of) the above policy, I think I understand it somewhat. This was a verbatim copy of what was on Wikipedia earlier, and that was my motivation for removing this content. Mind you, all I'm asking is for you to defend why you moved it here, and to understand why this content needed to come here. I think the admin that was culling the content on Wikipedia has a very unusual sense of what "original research" is really about, and this isn't it. This is a scholarly review of a book and detailing key points of what is within the book. As such, I think it could be an excellent article on Wikibooks in its current format with a little bit of nip and tuck to clean it up in some areas to make it seem more like a Wikipedia article, and perhaps work a tiny bit on the POV, as such it has. I guess you are not willing to take on that fight. The content wasn't put on Wikibooks until after it had been removed from Wikipedia.

As far as comparing this to other literary study guides, I would call most of those you cite as book stubs. This is something that has been debated here on Wikibooks off and on over the history of the project, but is considered a very low priority item to worry about right now. Often stubs will languish like this for quite some time after the initial creation of the content, which is one reason why we strongly encourage the content to remain on Wikipedia if it is even close to fitting on that project: It will simply get more attention and development by remaining on Wikipedia. The discussion about stubs is to decide if an eternal stub (one with no edits for more than a year and really only one one or two people contributing to them in the first place) should be deleted. I hope this content does not fall into that category. That discussion is not over, so certainly it is an issue for the future.

The copyright issue is something that should be resolved, as a formal disclaimer like "I have obtained copyright permission from the author to publish this on Wikipedia/Wikibooks under the GNU Free Documentation License" or "I grant copyright permission under the GFDL". For me that is sufficient, and I'm going to assume good faith on this issue. The other point raised was that this content "did not fit with WP:NOT where wikipedia is not a critical reviewer." I have no idea what this means, other than to suggest that things like book or movie reviews are not done on Wikipedia. But they are done... well sort of. A NPOV synopsis of movies and books often are given on Wikipedia, and even nominated as brilliant prose or featured articles. To suggest that this content could not be worked into a book synopsis with a NPOV is beyond me.

The point here ultimately is that I think you gave up too quickly on Wikipedia and let another editor get the best of you. Unfortunately, what is an excellent article candidate on Wikipedia, potentially even a featured article eventually, is going to be a book stub instead here and ignored. --Rob Horning 03:43, 7 April 2006 (UTC)

As I already said, Rob, the text can easily be copied back to Wikipedia (copy-edited for NPOV, length and formatting), we both agree on that. Plus there is currently a "See also" link to this page from the Wikipedia article. But, Wikipedia is not a study guide, with a study guide here, the teacher and students (and anyone else) have greater leeway in expanding the study guide as an educational resource. This is what Wikibooks was made for. The "author" is User talk:Tmchale, a teacher, (and students), at a K-12 in NJ, and they have given default permission by uploading it, but also by direct consent on the talk page(s) on Wikipedia. -- Stbalbach 05:37, 7 April 2006 (UTC)

Generally if it is a substantial addition of text, we prefer to have explict granting of copyright permission. I do see, however, that some form of granting that permission was obtained, and even the admin on Wikipedia was willing to revert the deletion because of copyright flaws. Instead, it was violating Wikipedia standards that were mainly cited as justification for deletion. My concerns that this is going to be a very stubby book that is largely ignored by the Wikibooks community IMHO will prove itself out in a year or two. I have the patience to wait and see, but it takes a critical mass for some Wikibooks to fully develop. I don't think this has quite enough material to do that. --Rob Horning 17:33, 9 April 2006 (UTC)

Given the statistics, your probably right, but are we running low on space, is there a one year grace period and things are purged? I thought this was a "100 year project", this guide could suddenly bloom in 5 years, when another class picks it up; Ive seen stuff languish for that long on Wikipedia, just takes the right person to come along and expand it. Also I'm not sure how big a Study Guide for this book would be, it's a short book with one main character and no plot, mainly a lot of themes. -- Stbalbach 23:00, 10 April 2006 (UTC)

There is no specific time frame, and this is something that we are trying to deal with right now in terms of what is something we can keep if nobody is working on it, and it is obviously just an initial start but no real meaningful content. Often people will start a "book" with an outline, but it doesn't go anywhere else after that, with some of these book outlines being here for more than two years. And this project is only three years old. In terms of running low on server space, that is not really the issue. Most of the stuff is being removed from Wikibooks because it either violates some basic principles, such as being a copyright violation or a personal essay that preaches a religious or political doctrine, or that it is seriously detracting from our primary mission of being a forum for authoring textbooks. Books like How to Rape are one of those. (Yes, a book with that title was started here.)

This content about Steinbeck is certainly not going to fall into any of those sorts of content. Occasionally there is some content that is so poorly written from a gramatical viewpoint that it is embaressing to have here, but the usual response is if you are so critical of it, clean it up. I don't know of Wikipedia and other Wikimedia projects will last 100 years, but there certainly is some strong motivation for people to be involved and try to maintain the content. Wikibooks will be a very different place even 5 years from now, and there are some very interesting parallels with Wikipedia in terms of its growth and development. --Rob Horning 12:28, 11 April 2006 (UTC)