Wikipedia:Articles for deletion/Annotated Lyrics to The Vicar of Bray

This clearly belongs on Wikibooks (or, possibly, Wikisource), not on Wikipedia.(Note: This is not necessarily unworthy material, but the full texts of, well, texts belong on Wikibooks (if annotated) or Wikisource. I might suggest that an encyclopedic article about this material would be perfectly fine for inclusion.) -- कुक्कुरोवाच|Talk‽ 00:28, 27 Jun 2004 (UTC)

For what it's worth, here's the pertinent convention (from Wikipedia:What Wikipedia is not: "14. Mere collections of public domain or other source material; such as entire books or source code, original historical documents, letters, laws, proclamations, and other source material that are only useful when presented with their original, un-modified wording. But of course there's nothing wrong with using public domain resources in order to add factual content and wording to an article (such as the use of the 1911 encyclopedia). See Wikipedia:Don't include copies of primary sources. Complete copies of primary sources (including any public domain documents you can find) should go into Wikisource."

• Nonetheless, we routinely include the lyrics of national anthems. I don't see this as very different. The point here isn't so much the text, it's the heavy wikification of a text full of allusions that are difficult for a modern reader. -- Jmabel 02:13, Jun 28, 2004 (UTC)

• And several versions of the Lord's Prayer. And the Nicene Creed in English, Latin, and Greek. And a 119-line excerpt from the Bhagavad Gita. And 112 lines of quotations, in Sanskrit and English, with few glosses and no explication, from the Mulamadhyamakakarika. All of these (except perhaps the last) are poetry, but all are on Wikipedia because they illustrate a larger point, and because without them the accompanying articles would be stilted ("...note the prosody of lines 10, 12, 22, and 30 (please see WikiSource, we don't quote source here)...") or mostly incomprehensible. orthogonal 19:20, 29 Jun 2004 (UTC)

• Keep, very much! The song is an old and popular nugget and well in public domain. The topical allusions in it are lost on contemporary readers/listeners. The song is significant in a number of ways. For one thing, "vicar of Bray" has entered English proverbs for anyone who changes with the political winds (often written as "the vicar of Bray is the vicar still"). I have quarrels with the annotations, but that's because 18th c. England is my field. My biggest problem is the article title. Very tortured title, there. Geogre 00:36, 27 Jun 2004 (UTC)
  • I've already voted, but the main link to the article is the article on the phenomenon of "Vicar of Bray." An explication of the lyrics is interesting and informative, to me, and I don't think the article is just source. (I know I plan to add to it.) I have reservations, and I could understand asking that the lyrics, with annotation, be in the main "VoB" article, although this was probably originally done to keep article length down. (Apologies for rambling.) Geogre 02:35, 27 Jun 2004 (UTC)
• Keep. Article is more than just lyrics. Move to Vicar of Bray (song) ? Wile E. Heresiarch 02:47, 27 Jun 2004 (UTC)
• Keep, although it could do with the annotations being more inline. —Lady Lysine Ikinsile | Talk 05:51, 2004 Jun 27 (UTC)
• Clean up and merge into The Vicar of Bray. -- Jmabel 06:42, Jun 27, 2004 (UTC)

• As I started and wrote most of the page, I'll not vote in order to avoid being "a judge in my own cause", but I'd like to advance a few reasons to keep the page.

First, the song is well worth a place in the Wikipedia, for reasons that others have ably given above. Even Kukkurovaca, in asking it be deleted, agrees, when he admits that he "might suggest that an encyclopedic article about this material would be perfectly fine for inclusion."

But, second, given that the song is one allusion to English religious politics after another, it seems to me there's no honest way to write about the song without including it in its entirety. Writing something along the lines of "This famous song made allusion to many political events leading to the Glorious Revolution", without giving the text of the song would make a empty, uninteresting, and useless husk with the sole "virtue" of slavishly adhering to a "no source text rule". Or to paraphrase Tom Paine, we'd "pity the plumage, but forget the dying bird."

Without the explicit annotations, the real import of the song is apt to be lost on a modern reader (or listener), but with explication it serves to tie together and illustrate, in a very succinct manner, a complicated and important era of English history (and the history of the growth of the idea of religious freedom, for that matter), making it not only a stand-alone article but an introduction to the topics to which it alludes. In this, it demonstrates why the Wikipedia format is so much more powerful than more traditional reference works. To remove such a fitting example of the Wikipedia format because of the dead hand of a Wikipedia rule would seem a perverse and Pyrrhic "victory" at best. orthogonal 14:44, 27 Jun 2004 (UTC)

• Keep, by all means. The subject is significant and historically valid, and the article would be nigh-unintelligible without the lyrics. Smerdis of Tlön 14:36, 28 Jun 2004 (UTC)

• Keep, with some doubts. I agree that the comments would be better inline: a few lines of the lyrics, then some comment, a few lines of lyrics, then some comment. I do see slipperly slope here. What happens when someone tries to do the same thing with Joyce's Finnegan's Wake with an article on each paragraph? jallan 22:34, 28 Jun 2004 (UTC)
  • Well, for one thing Finnegans Wake (no apostrophe, BTW) is copyrighted, but, ignoring that, maybe eventually we would do well to have another wiki to develop annotated editions of difficult works. Like Nabakov's Pale Fire, and like it in more senses than one, I fear. Meanwhile, they fall uncomfortably between Wikipedia and Wikisource. This one seems short enough not to be a problem for Wikipedia.

Not to beat a dead horse or anything, but we do have such a wiki; that's part of the scope of Wikibooks. -- कुक्कुरोवाच|Talk‽ 23:09, 28 Jun 2004 (UTC)

• Delete. But before anyone gets upset, read on. Firstly, I think its an excellent piece of work. But I'm going to say move to Wikibooks, because I believe it actually does belong there. It is not wikisource, but it is a study on a poem, which is definately in the realm of wikibooks. It is not an encyclopedic article, since it attempts to enlighten the reader to meaning, rather than alluding to and explaining the meaning which has been discovered. Its a narrow line, but it certainly does exist. Keep in mind Wikibooks is not just a place to copy public domain books; it is basically public works in progress. A link to it—once moved—from The Vicar of Bray should certainly be provided. —siroχo 02:00, Jun 29, 2004 (UTC)

Thanks for saying it's excellent work -- but while I originated the article, I can't take credit; the real heavy lifting is due to User:Geogre, and the much improved formatting to User:Jmabel. But not to beat a dead horse, I'd probably agree with you to move it to Wikibooks if it were a normal poem. But it's not.

A normal poem is meant to be universal, to touch emotions that do not vary across cultures or eras; this is why Sappho's poetry still speaks to us over a chasm of millennia (and for some of us, other chasms as well). "The Vicar of Bray" is primarily a political satire, and so doesn't speak so clearly to us moderns without annotation. Listening to it, for most of us in the 21st Century, would be like a person living three hundred years hence listening to a song mentioning "Clinton", "Lewinsky", "Ashcroft", and "Padilla'. No contemporary song would explain these references, because it would take for granted that any educated person would know them. But will "Ken Starr" or even "Bill Clinton" be generally known in 2304? (One does hope "Ashcroftism" will be an epithet like McCarthyism, though.) As Geogre puts it, Annotated Vicar "isn't an explication of a poem. It's an annotation of the history/politics."

Kukkurovaca (according to the page history) decided the article did not belong on Wikipedia less that 90 minutes after I'd begun the article, while I was still wrestling with the rough draft, and long before other Wikipedians significantly broadened and improved the article. I hope that the article will be judged based on its current merits and not by a knee-jerk reaction to its title. orthogonal 14:36, 29 Jun 2004 (UTC)

• I'm guessing that there is no one any more who thinks this should simply be deleted. We all agree the material should be preserved, it's just a question of where. Seems to me that there are three reasonable possibilities here:
  • Keep the article where it is.
  • Merge into Vicar of Bray (my vote).
  • Transwiki to wikibooks and link from Vicar of Bray.

-- Jmabel 17:07, Jun 29, 2004 (UTC)

• Keep. (I thought I'd already voted but the edit seems to have been lost in a timeout.) Fascinating article and encyclopedic, and no copyright problems. I'm a bit nervous that the current rules seem at first sight to say delete, and if so IMO the rules are wrong. But I also think it's important to note that this is not merely a source text, the important information is in the annotation. IMO the rules just need clarifying, they don't really seek to prohibit this sort of material. Andrewa 09:55, 30 Jun 2004 (UTC)

• An excellent point. While I think it's a good thing that we have the full text of the United States Bill of Rights, I think it would be a great project to annotate it with links to illustrative case law, Supreme Court decisions that delimit and apply those rights, its philosophic underpinning in the Federalist Papers and the writing of Montesquieu (branches of government) and Hobbes (social contract), its historical motivations (e.g., what British actions motivated the Third Amendment, and why was it subsequently never really at issue as the other amendments were and are?). Similarly, I think a selection of annotated sources of key British legislation (such as the Test Act), with annotations to subsequent and superseding legislation, would be invaluable. Of course, paper dictionaries don't include source because that would make paper dictionaries so large as to be unwieldy, and because the linking technology ("cf") is hardly as convenient. But neither of these objections apply to Wikipedia, and I think we do ourselves a disservice by so rigidly eschewing (appropriately annotated) source texts.

A key advantage to source texts is that they speak to the reader in the words of their times -- and serve to transport the reader, just a little, to the author's world (and worldview). Reading "John, by the grace of God, king of England, lord of Ireland,..." sends shivers down the spine over a gap of 789 years in a way that the bald phrase "King John signed the Magna Carta in 1215" simply cannot. Its first clause "In the first place we have granted to God, and by this our present charter confirmed for us and our heirs forever that the English Church shall be free" cries out for a close annotation. Tell the present day reader why a charter of rights begins by mentioning the "English Church" and you have pointed out to him the keystone of English political history that undergirds and explains Henry VIII and John Locke (a theologian as well as a political philosopher) and the Test Act and the Glorious Revolution. Not including (annotated) source is like trying to describe a building's architecture without being allowed to display blueprints: we say what the finished building looks like without ever being able to explain how the architect saw it as it was being built.

On Wikipedia's Magna Carta page, we write that

Magna Carta is still part of English Law. However, the only part that has not been repealed or superceded are the introductory sentences, so it has no practical use and is retained only because it has been such an important historical document. Despite this, it is still used in arguments about reform of the jury system.

What a wonderful day (or week, or month) a Wikipedia reader could spend with a annotated Magna Carta with links to both immediate and ultimate (current) Acts that supersede it, with footnotes explaining reasons for the supersession. It would be, in a single page, a distillation of 800 years of English Constitutional Law, a grand odyssey of political liberty. It is a shame if Wikipedia rules discourage, with penalty of automatic deletion, such a grand possibilities. -- orthogonal 14:30, 30 Jun 2004 (UTC)

• Comment: (No change of vote) I'm not sure whether this is sarcastic or not. But either way:
  • It raises some good points.
  • I'm not convinced that VfD is the place for such long arguments, which seem to be becoming more common and perhaps I am also guilty of this. See the talk page.
  • Keeping this article doesn't provide a precedent for including the whole of the Magna Carta on the grounds of the paragraph quoted above from the existing article. So don't worry, Wikisource still has a job either way.
  • The United States Bill of Rights article seems excellent to me, and the quoted text not excessive but close to the limit. As with who is notable enough to be encyclopedic, IMO there's some personal and community judgement required. Andrewa 16:16, 30 Jun 2004 (UTC)
    • Andrewa, this is meant to be a response to your declaration that it is not source text and does not belong on wikisource. I certainly agree with that. Recall, though, the purpose of Wikibooks. Read the top of wikibooks:Main Page, and then also look in the contents. Wikibooks is essentually reference texts and similar items written by people like us. In fact, there is a section on Annotated Texts. This is most certainly an Annotated text.
      • Comment: Interesting comment, Siroxo. I admit I'd assumed that this would be too short for Wikibooks, unless as part of a larger text. I guess you're referring to the description of Wikibooks as textbooks, manuals and other texts (my emphasis). But even if this does qualify, I don't think the fact that something is suitable for a sister project necessarily makes it not suitable for Wikipedia. There is both overlap and underlap. Some of the same information about famous people killed at 9/11 belongs both in the Memorial Wiki and in Wikipedia, for example. More comments on your user talk page. Andrewa 01:31, 1 Jul 2004 (UTC)
• Keep. What we have here is an excellent article about a significant piece of literature which happens to be presented in the form of hyperlinked annotations to the original text. Dpbsmith 02:01, 1 Jul 2004 (UTC)