Talk:Letters of a Portuguese Nun

The infobox books has now been included. JoJan 09:50, 1 February 2007 (UTC)

Article fairly heavily sprinkled w/POV

Ex:

The letters could also be considered pieces of unconscious psychological self-analysis. The five short passionate, lyrical letters, written by Mariana to "expostulate her desertion", form one of the few documents of extreme human experience and reveal a passion which, in the course of three centuries, has lost nothing of its heat. Their absolute candour, exquisite tenderness, absolute passion, hope, pleas and despair and entire self-abandonment have excited the wonder and admiration of great men and women in every age from Madame de Sévigné to Gladstone.

This kind of thing needs to be removed from an encylopedic article. I'm thinking this is someone's baby so I'm not going to edit it yet, but whoever feels the most strongly about this article, please do make an effort to tidy it up and remove opinions, review-style narratives, etc. I'll check back later and do it myself, otherwise.  :)

Sugarbat 16:11, 20 April 2007 (UTC)

WikiProject class rating

This article was automatically assessed because at least one article was rated and this bot brought all the other ratings up to at least that level. BetacommandBot 07:11, 27 August 2007 (UTC)

COPYRIGHT VIOLATIONS

Thanks very much to whoever's responsible for this. I just spent quite some time copy-editing this article for punctuation, usage, clarity and the like, and in the course of fact-checking discovered that it's almost identical to this article: http://www.1911encyclopedia.org/Marianna_Alcoforado.

I have no way of verifying which article came first, but in neither article do I see citation referring to the other. Since the bits in the WP article that match those of the 1911encyclopedia.org one tend to be non-factual and non-objective (i.e., not appropriate for WP), AND since the 1911encyclopedia.org is "based on the 11th edition of the Encyclopoedia Britannica," I tend to think those bits they originated there (at 1911encyclopedia.org).

I'm deleting everything in the WP article that smacks of non-objectivity, and strongly suggest that the person who cares most about this article high-tail it back here and finish the job of either citing references, or removing copyright violations.

Please, people, don't plaguarize. Aside from being illegal and unethical, it also wastes enormous amounts of time, as above. Sugarbat (talk) 20:06, 29 April 2008 (UTC)

P.S.: I just want to clarify that, while I do see the "attribution" at the bottom of the article (about "portions of this article" having come from "the 1911 Encyclopoedia Britannica"), that "reference" is invalid for at least two reasons:

1.) The "portions," as far as I can tell, did not come from "the 1911 Encycopoedia Britannica." They came from a website -- http://www.1911encyclopedia.org/Marianna_Alcoforado. Therefore, the citation is incorrectly worded.

2.) Just because you attribute something doesn't mean you get to use it. Did Encyclopoedia Britannica give us permission to republish portions of the above article in Wikipedia? I doubt it. Too, the "portions" used (ripped off) from EB are, in many cases, opinions, not fact -- which makes me suspect they might not have actually been in any version of EB. (The syntax of the article on 1911encyclopedia.org, additionally, convinces me that that article is NOT a reprint of an article written in 1911, which makes the whole issue ten times more confusing.)

I know the article is now butchered, and half missing. I didn't intend to do anything other than copy-edit; I don't know enough about the subject -- the book, or its author -- to do either content-editing (other than fact-checking) or to rewrite any, or all, of the article without violating copyright. I had no choice but to delete stuff that either violated copyright, or was not encyclopedic in content (i.e., opinions, etc.). Please someone come and fix this article -- BUT DON'T USE MATERIAL FROM 1911encyclopedia.org! Sugarbat (talk) 20:29, 29 April 2008 (UTC)

A belated answer. Although I didn't write the deleted parts, the 1911 Encyclopaedia Brittanica is public domain (see: Wikipedia:Public domain resources). The content of the article in the 1911 encyclopaedia [[1]] can be used in Wikipedia, although not in the form of a text dump. However, I agree with you that this must be done with the utmost care for fact checking and further developments. On the other hand, I think you have deleted a bit too much. I remember vaguely having read in other sources how this (so-called ?) attribution to Alcoforado came into being and what stunning effect these letters had on contemporary literature. With a bit of luck, I may find those references. But this may take some time, as I am fully occupied at this time preparing and researching a biography for the nl wikipedia. JoJan (talk) 15:25, 4 May 2008 (UTC)

Thanks very much for this -- and I do agree; I probably did delete more than necessary. My only defense is two-part: I wanted to be sure not to miss anything that really ought to have been deleted/edited, and I also hoped that the mauling would inspire someone (more knowledgeable than I) to fix the whole thing. :) I also agree with you about the inadvisability of appropriating whole blocks of unedited text from public-domain resources. I should have been clearer in my comment, above, about that, and specified that, while the information found on a public domain is usable, the actual syntax risks copyright violation. (For example, remember what we all did in elementary school, especially back before the internet: when assigned reports on things like "The Marsupials of Australia" and "The Battle of Waterloo"; most of us copied sentences and sometimes whole paragraphs from encyclopediae. The extent of our "editing" and personal touches extended, at best, to moving the copied sentences around, and maybe sprinkling in some slang and misspellings, for flavor. Our teachers didn't buy it then, and I don't buy it now.)

Additionally, I find the "1911" article itself highly editorial (the whole thing is 50% opinion), and therefore not applicable in the context of a Wikipedia article on the subject.

I do hope, in the interest of this article, that you do eventually find the time to come back and work some magic, but I totally appreciate the practical limitations imposed on your (and all volunteers') time. Sugarbat (talk) 22:16, 5 May 2008 (UTC)

I found a few more references and sources. Also, the French wikipedia article is very instructive. JoJan (talk) 17:43, 10 May 2008 (UTC)

JoJan: You're awesome to have added some really good stuff to this article. I hope you won't be mad that I cleaned it up slightly -- see edit summaries for info, and please do let me know if you have any questions about anything I did. I'm also very pleased you posted a photo of the window (of Mertola); it's a great illustration.

I'm wondering if, instead of the excerpts/summaries from the letters (that I removed as redundant) we could find some original photostats of pages -- like from an early edition? I'll poke around and see if I can find some in English (for this version of WP) that are copyright-free. What do you think? Sugarbat (talk) 22:22, 12 May 2008 (UTC)

Thanks for improving my (sometimes awkward) English. However, the summaries of the letters were duly referenced. I based the summaries on the text in "Le Robert : Dictionnaire des Grandes Oeuvres de la Littérature française" and on the original text (in French). In my opinion, those texts are copyright-free, since the author died more than 70 years ago (copyright law). I also added a few notable epistolary novels and removed the fact template. JoJan (talk) 15:47, 13 May 2008 (UTC)

AUTORSHIP

The works of authors who agree with the letter's being work of Gabriel-Joseph de la Vergne is cited. Yet there is no mention of their reasoning and there is no backing up of the claim that this authorship is generally accepted (by who and who atested it). On the other hand the main reasons that made cited Myriam Cyr to agree with the autorship by Mariana Alcoforado are mentioned, leaving both sides a bit unbalanced. Funny that on French wikipedia there is also mention of the possibility of the autorship by Noël Bouton de Chamilly himself as proposed by Marie-Nicolas Bouillet, not cited tho. I can try myself to dig into it but I dont have access to any of the mentioned authors and their cited works at the moment. If someone does and want to do it would be appreciated.Learningnave (talk) 19:36, 26 June 2012 (UTC)