Talk:Moby-Dick/Archive 2

Archive 1

Archive 2

Archive 3

More thoughts and suggestions on further revisions

Friends -- let us once again thank MackyBeth for energetic intelligence and faithful work which are a shining example for all to follow. I especially appreciate that proposed changes were announced here on the Talk Page, though perhaps a few days wait is not ample warning for major changes, especially in August, when many of us are hot and sleepy or on vacation. I see several issues for discussion.

Some of these go back to the archived discussions of December 2013, where the WP:NOVSTY guidelines were mentioned. The structure of an article on a novel should generally be:

• Lead section
• Plot
• Characters
• Major themes
• Style
• Background
• Publication history
• Reception
• Adaptations
• Footnotes and references

Of course, each article has different needs, but it's not up to us to get too far from the pattern.

Thoughts:

• The length of the article. My basic worry is that at c. 76,000kb the article is getting too long for readers to see clearly. The guideline WP:TOOBIG says articles which are:

> 100 kB Almost certainly should be divided

> 60 kB Probably should be divided (although the scope of a topic can sometimes justify the added reading material)

> 50 kB May need to be divided (likelihood goes up with size)

This suggests that the article already "probably should be divided," though there is certainly wiggle room, but we should discuss before we make major additions.

Taking the top ten novels in the Greatest Books site, this table shows that our Moby Dick article is the longest of the top ten; that the lead is also the longest; and that most of the others do not have quotes from famous authors or critics, though many do (the numbers are rounded):

Rank	ARTICLE	CLASS	LENGTH	WORDS IN LEAD
5	Moby Dick	B	76,000	361 words (4 quotes) cut to 276, one quote
1	Ulysses (novel)	C	50,000	282 (one quote)
2	In Search of Lost Time	C	74,000	324 (no quote)
3	Don Quixote	B	50,000	229 (one quote)
4	The Great Gatsby	GOOD	67,000	321 (no quote, but rank)
6	Lolita	C	73,000	225 (no quotes)
7	The Sound and the Fury	C	30,000	122 (no quotes)
8	Madame Bovary	C	23,000	196(1 quote)
9	One Hundred Years of Solitude	B	49,000	123 (no quotes)
10	Anna Karenina	C	45,000	175 (4 quotes)

Of course, we can find ten other random or specifically chosen articles showing other features, so let's not get caught up in specific comparisons, only a general idea of parameters in a bunch of representative articles.

This is only to show that the MD article would not be an outlier if we pared it down.

• The section on characters. It strikes me that this is actually a desirable section. The suggestion at Content removal is that content should not be removed simply to reduce article size, here to make room for a plot summary. Still, of the ten articles in the table only about half have a section on characters, so it's not a big deal. You may be right that the links to the individual articles for each character are enough, but it also may be that the themes of the book could be clarified and enriched by a section on the most important characters. My suggestion is that we consider restoring a short section on Characters. There should be room for it if the Plot Summary is reduced -- dare I say "tried out"?
• Plot summary: The essay WP:PLOTSUMNOT suggests that the summary "should not cover every scene and every moment of a story" and that "While longer descriptions may appear to provide more data to the reader, a more concise summary may in fact be more informative as it highlights the most important elements." In any case, the plot summary should not get longer.

This guideline also warns

"Do not attempt to recreate the emotional impact of the work through the plot summary. Wikipedia is not a substitute for the original."

"The three basic elements of a story are plot, character and theme. Anything that is not necessary for a reader's understanding of these three elements, or is not widely recognized as an integral or iconic part of the work's notability, should not be included."

Just by eyeballing, I would guess that we could reduce the length by a third to a half and increase the usefulness.

• The lead. The length has crept up (most additions are fine taken one by one, but they do not all belong in the lead) and the focus gotten fuzzy (the themes would be more effective if organized paragraph by paragraph). I explained my edits one by one in the edit summaries.

The Encyclopedia Britannica article "Moby Dick" is a model of concision.

Again, much appreciation for considering these thoughts! ch (talk) 04:02, 19 August 2014 (UTC)

• • Thanks ch for your thoughtful comments, and for your tightening of the article. I was starting to feel a bit lonely here. I tightened the lead some more and took out the discussion of Hawthorne's influence, because it suggests a knowledge about the course of composition that we do not have: consensus among 21st-century scholars is difficult to pin down, but the section "composition" has a quotation from the 2007 Longman Edition in which the editors say that nothing is known about this.

1. I deleted some subheadings for sections that are too small to warrant a heading of their own. The result is that you can see more clearly that the Table of Content is in agreement with Wikipedia:Manual of Style/Novels.
2. As for the list of characters, I did not remove it to make room for the plot summary, but because the list was excessively long and the major characters have subpages of their own. The subpage List of Moby-Dick characters was created in March, and on 12 August the list of characters as a section on the main page was removed. From that date the page view statistics show an increase in views of the characters subpage. So it may be wise indeed to tighten the character list and then put it back on the main page.
3. I wrote the Plot summary after having first carefully read the Wikipedia plot summary guidelines you are quoting from, so I am familiar with them. These guidelines state that for long or complex works the plot may be somewhat longer. Moby-Dick is both long and complex, and a special difficulty is that it has no straight "cause-and-effect" plot, which makes it less obvious to see what can be left out. For instance, the meeting with the nine ships: the Pequod does not meet ship number seven because she first met number three: no cause-and-effect here. But these meetings serve to give the book a kind of structure, and therefore I decided to include all nine meetings in the plot summary rather than just three or four by way of example. A plot summary should not just indicate what the book is about, but supply a genuine summary. One other book difficult to summarize according to a conservative interpretation of the guidelines is the Ulysses on the above list. Look how elaborate the description of the chapters in that article is. These two books are exceptional cases, and it is difficult to see how a plot summary within the boundaries of the guidelines can still be adequate. For these difficult works it will be more important to reach consensu through Talk pages rather than appeal to what guidelines say. Let me be clear that I am not against shortening the plot summary per se, but these aspects deserve consideration first.
4. The length of the article as a whole is a concern indeed, especially since important sections as Style and Themes are hardly developed at all. Sections that I added on Publication and Composition are way too expansive. The section on Reception may be curbed as well. But hey, concise encyclopedic writing is a skill that takes Time, Strength, and Patience (but not Cash) to develop.
5. As for my typos, I should indeed be more careful. The solution will be for me to shape material in a sandbox and then read it over before I add it to the page.
6. I have looked at the guidelines for article size, Wikipedia:Article_size#Size_guideline and there they distinguish between the size of readable prose and the wiki markup size. So if the above stated length in bytes count for the markup size and not for just the language on the page, then we may still have some leeway. But even if that is the case, it is reasonable to shorten some sections. I think Publication, Background are candidates. The thing is that the size of a book reasonably only bears on the size of the plot, but there is no reason why other sections should be bigger.MackyBeth (talk) 15:58, 22 August 2014 (UTC)

Hope that I was of help, MackyBeth -- and sorry that the TalkPage was feeling lonely. Here are some thoughts on your comments on my comments:

• I'm not sure I understand the reason for taking Hawthorne out of the lead. At the very least it's of basic importance that the book is dedicated to him. The section on Composition which you refer to, says that HM's essay on Hawthorne's Mosses is

so deeply related to Melville's imaginative and intellectual world while writing Moby-Dick," Bezanson finds, "as to be everybody's prime piece of contextual reading."

Besides, there are so many letters from HM to NH which profess a debt that I don't think there's any doubt of Hawthorne's influence while he was writing, nor that "over the course of composition, the work became more metaphysical and questioning." What is the "21st century scholarship" that would doubt that it was "probably under the influence of Nathaniel Hawthorne"? I'd be happy to rephrase.

• Deleting the subheadings was a very good move, one which does indeed make the TOC easier to map to the article's contents.
• You are right that a plot summary for MD is a unique challenge, and you have set sail in the right direction. But still it's a "draught, or a draught of a draught," so if we don't have the cash, at least we have the time and the patience! If it's OK, I'll pare things down just a little more to make room for other additions. Another possibility would be to rack our brains for ways to make the structure of the book more apparent, if, indeed, there is such a structure. The plot summary for Ulysses is complicated but clearly structured. But HM's botches and doublings are tougher, since much of the "plot" is metaphysical and might make more sense in your sections on theme. I agree that you are right that length is not the main consideration, but we need to honor the guidelines when they say that "a more concise summary may in fact be more informative as it highlights the most important elements."

Cheers once again! ch (talk) 05:50, 23 August 2014 (UTC)

Hawthorne and the two Moby-Dicks theory

Hello ch! Your sensible edits and suggestions are helpful indeed, and you are right that Hawthorne deserves to be mentioned in the lede because the book was dedicated to him. (This makes me think that, since all of Melville's book have dedications, they should be mentioned in all the leads to insure as uniform a policy as we can muster.) Your sentence on Hawthorne stated that "over the course of composition, the book became more metaphysical and questioning, probably under the influence of Hawthorne." This contradicts what is in the article itself, especially the paragraph of Composition that I quote here for convenience:

"The book would be finished a year later than announced, giving room for scholars to develop a theory about the work's course of completion which holds that Melville's original conception was a straight narrative of a whaling voyage, only changed into the book it became after he met Hawthorne. The theory has been harpooned in two ways by Bezanson: he disagrees with both the underlying assumption about Melville's intellectual development before 1850 and the way scholars have been evaluating the evidence. "The implication here," Bezanson argues, "is that Melville was not ready for the kind of book Moby-Dick became, that he despaired of picking up where he had left off with Mardi, that the critics, or financial need, or self-doubt, or a combination of these for six months had him tied down. But the profile that emerges from reading the documents, beginning with the almost rudely bold letter he wrote to John Murray on 25 March 1848, a virtual declaration of literary independence, takes quite another shape." Melville's letters of this period show him denouncing his last two straight narratives, Redburn and White-Jacket, as two books written just for the money, and he firmly stood by Mardi as the kind of book he believed in. His language is already "richly steeped in seventeenth century mannerisms," which are characteristic of the style of Moby-Dick."

Not (yet) quoted in the article is what John Bryant and Haskell Springer write in the introduction to their 2007 Longman Critical Edition of Moby-Dick: "No one knows how Melville came upon the idea of writing Moby-Dick, whether he first conceived it as just another personal narrative, or as an ambitious fiction, like Mardi" (viii). Whether Melville found a plot "or simply determined that he would discover his plot in the process of writing, is not known" (ix). In 1988 the Northwestern-Newberry edition of Moby-Dick appeared, with an essay by Harrison Hayford detailing the development of "the two Moby-Dicks"-theory, which holds that Melville's ambition changed after he met Hawthorne. In his review of the book in Melville Society Extracts (74, September 1988), Warner Berthoff is sceptical and says that "some positive discovery of new archival data" is needed to carry us further. Here is a link to that page of his thorough review (the whole review is worth reading, especially for Berthoff's discussion of questionable textual emendations): Warner Berthoff on the composition of Moby-Dick.

In SUMMARY of the above: in 1954 Stewart started the two Moby-Dicks theory of composition, which was carried further in the following decades by, among others, important scholars as Leon Howard and Harrison Hayford. Though the total of scholars engaging in this enterprise is only six, these men were so influential that the theory has become sort of accepted. However, in 1977 Robert Milder published "A Review and a Prospect" on the theory in ESQ, which exposed the theory's weaknesses and discussed counterevidence. In 1986 Bezanson's essay in A Companion to Melville Studies argues against the theory. Since the 1988 Moby-Dick no one has contributed further on the theory, and in 2007 Bryant and Springer state explicitly that nothing is known about how Moby-Dick was written. Current scholarly consensus, which is what Wikipedia should reflect, seems to me to be this: the theory is unconvincing, because 1)there is not enough evidence to work with, and 2) the existing evidence, such as statements in Melville's letters, is ambiguous.

Back to HAWTHORNE: the dedication says: "In token of my admiration for his genius." It does not say something like "For Hawthorne, without whom this book could not have been written" or anything like that, but instead expresses admiration for Hawthorne himself, independent of whatever influence he may have had. So a sentence in the lead of the dedication to Hawthorne should not imply any influence on the composition of Moby-Dick.MackyBeth (talk) 08:55, 23 August 2014 (UTC)

Source for Moby-Dick#Publication_history online

Google Books offers a generous amount of pages for preview, including much of the Editorial Appendix: Moby-Dick; or, The Whale. I have just linked this web address twice on the Moby-Dick page, first at the first citation of the appendix, which occurs at the beginning of the section "Publication history" (currently numbered note 53), and second at the appearance of the edition in "Sources," Melville (1988). The basis for virtually all of the information in the section "Publication history" of the Wikipedia article is section VI of the "Note on the Text," which according to what the appendix states is attributed in "Sources" to G. Thomas Tanselle. Much of Tanselle's contribution is immediately accessible by clicking the Google Books link above and then scroll through to pages 659-688. Maybe somebody who has some minutes or so to spare will be so kind as to check if the Wikipedia language (section "Publication history") is removed far away from Tanselle's formulations so as not to violate policy. Tanselle's contribution is one of the most interesting parts of the editorial matter, your time will be well spent. MackyBeth (talk) 18:49, 23 August 2014 (UTC)

Moby-Dick; or, The Whale and The Whale; or, Moby-Dick

At Moby-Dick#Last-minute_change_of_title the article says that the British edition has a title page with the title The Whale; or, Moby-Dick, and it makes sense that sooner or later a reader would perceive this as a mistake and change the order of the words, which edit Holothurion has now made. However, the British version was published as The Whale, because the new title arrived too late for the publisher to change this. So he made a gesture and added Moby-Dick to a title page. It seems likely that in the future others will stumble upon this too and make the same edit to correct the perceived "mistake." Then it would probably be wise to delete this admittedly minor fact from the article altogether. Fortunately, the page in the editorial appendix where this is detailed is among the pages Google Books allows us to read: See page 672 for the title The Whale; or, Moby-Dick.

Cheers, MackyBeth (talk) 07:58, 24 August 2014 (UTC)

Indeed, the real mistake was completely on my part, as I edited the text based on the title page shown at the article's top, only to realize almost immediately (but after saving the changes) that it belongs to the first American edition, not to the English one (my bad for not double-checking, which I always do). I corroborated the actual fact precisely on the version to which you kindly provide a link to (albeit on a different source) and was in the process of reverting said edit when I noticed that it was already been corrected (thanks for that!), a long with the notification pertaining this talk.

Regarding the matter of deleting or not the fact from the text, I suggest to keep it on it, as, although minor, it complements the information about the book's publication history and the differences between the American and English editions, adding to the picture as a whole. — Holothurion (talk) 08:48, 24 August 2014 (UTC)

Your edit is of the kind that could be included in the Wikipedia:Assume_good_faith policy as a terrifically clear example of an edit made with every intention to improve the article. As for your suggestion about keeping it, I have no intention yet to remove it, but as you can see above, we have been discussing that the article is now quite long already, and the most literary sections (Theme and Style) have not even been sufficiently developed. Eventually some sections will have to be shortened to keep the size in line with the conciseness characteristic of encyclopdiac writing.MackyBeth (talk) 09:41, 24 August 2014 (UTC)

I agree with MackyBeth in welcoming Holothurion's attention to the article, and also that this section on the publication history is running a little long. We might consolidate the subsection on the change in title but keep the basic fact that there was such a change. I warned future editors by adding a comment which is invisible to readers but visible when editing by putting it between "<!--" and "-->". (If you look at the previous sentence in editing mode you can see that I had to mark it with "nowiki" for the darn thing to show since it made itself invisible!) ch (talk) 18:23, 24 August 2014 (UTC)

That's a cool device! Recently I looked at some FA articles to see how concise they are, and to learn from that. I just copied the complete section "Publication history" onto my sandbox and saw it was 15,500 bytes. Obviously this is too long. The Manual of Style for Novels requires 7 sections that should be included in any article on a work of fiction (Plot, Theme, Style, Background, Publication history, Reception, Adaptation). As a rule of thumb, I would propose that a section should never exceed 10,000 bytes. The first step is to curb this section and its subsections in my sandbox first, and then transfer the shortened sections one by one onto the main page. The good news is: there are some lengthy quotations that can be shortened easily. That will not only save us some bytes but also make the section look tighter right away.MackyBeth (talk) 19:14, 24 August 2014 (UTC)