Talk:Poetry of Mao Zedong

If you are interested, please help me to improve this article, especially the style and grammars!

Yiyu 02:50, 10 October 2005 (UTC)

It's not complete yet, will annotate all poems.

Yiyu 04:33, 10 October 2005

Major Cleanup Required

So, this article contained references only to primary sources, namely collections of Mao's poetry. None of the claims about Mao's poetry were referenced. I'm not an expert editor here, but I think that the long quotations of Mao's poetry are misplaced. Not only is it unclear whether the translations being provided were in the public domain (and one of the translations was not cited at all), but Wikipedia is not a repository for poetry. I think that Wikisource is where we put things like that. For that reason, I have removed the full quotations of poems.

This didn't leave much content, and all of it unsourced. I've consolidated the long list of poems into a single statement explaining when Mao wrote them, and that many of them were in reference to major events in the Chinese Civil War, which is most of what was substantive about the former content. The former presentation was far too detailed, and it wasn't always clear what, if anything, was encyclopedically relevant about those details. In addition, without a verifiable secondary source that lists Mao's "important" poems, and perhaps provides a window on the literary consensus around these poems, this level of detail is out of place.

Finally, there were subtle POV issues, that I have mostly edited out, but which make the former article somewhat suspect. For example, the passage in the article which read:

"Red Army was beaten several time by the pursuing KMT army. They used up all ammunitions and were starved. Then on the New Year of 1929 they fought a desperate fight in the snow at Dabodi, using stones and bare hands, and beat their enemy. Mao revisited this place several years later and wrote this poem."

This is written in a rather dramatic voice, and has hints of romanticizing the Communist position in the Civil War.

If good secondary sources cannot be provided to flesh out the article, I would suggest that we keep a small section of whatever can be verified in the main article.

--Luna (talk) 02:29, 4 April 2012 (UTC)

I find this editorial approach unnecessarily preemptive and clumsy: although certainly not without valid reason. However, it is not true that references to primary sources are totally invalid, although certainly references to secondary sources here would be much desirable here. Perhaps it's better not to throw the baby out with the bath water? Wikisource seems to be a good repository for poems by Mao, or whoever, however, Luna appears to have deleted much material and deposited none at Wikisource. Blanking large sections of articles because of editorial frustration about being "unclear whether the translations being provided were in the public domain" or "one of the translations was not cited at all" is not the way to go. How about adding some Citation needed tags etc., exercising a little patience? Similarly, "subtle POV issues" are not to be dealt with by wholesale removal of the perceived offending content, by just one editor, in one bold shot. Please try to be more subtle, and actually improve the article rather than stripping it of content which you personally don't care for. Dcattell (talk) 05:33, 4 April 2012 (UTC)

Hey there. This isn't simply, for me, about deleting content that I don't care for. I am a strong proponent of the availability of free, accessible primary sources even of historical figures that I don't like (Mao, for example). I didn't delete this content because I don't like Mao. Let's put it more clearly. Neither of the cited translations is clearly in the public domain, as both are books, one published in 1972, the other in 1993. Citing full poems (not short quotes to illustrate a point) would be a violation of copyright, if I'm not mistaken? Thus, I didn't port the poems to Wikisource because I would then be creating bad pages in Wikisource which would have to be deleted. The POV is subtle, but it is not the sole reason that I deleted the content. I actually spent a few hours trying to rework the article into something passable as encyclopedic working from the assumption the article's original author had good sources, but didn't cite them. If you read through the version that you have restored, you will find bad formatting and sections which are empty of usable content.

The section on Changsha has an unsourced assertion that this is one of Mao's best poems (an assertion I preserved with a citation needed tag in my much pared down version of the article), an external link to the poem in Chinese (which should properly be moved to the external links section if it is from a reliable source), and an "informal translation" of the full text of the poem. What is the source of the informal translation? What does that even mean? My suspicion, given the other comments on this talk page, is that it is original research, and whether it is or not, Wikipedia isn't a repository for the full text of poems, right? See articles on John Milton or William Blake, for example.

I removed the statement that Mao's poems are usually published in groups of twenty, because without further information I don't know what value this statement would have to a potential reader. Is there some significance to this manner of publication? If so, we'll need secondary sources that discuss it.

The rest of the article consists of sections that detail many of Mao's published poems, individually, one by one. The information provided in these sections is of dubious relevance to the article, whose title is "Poetry of Mao Zedong." For example, the section on the poem "Yellow Crane Tower" gives details about the tower, not the poem. It also includes a quote of a poem by Cui Hao, but there is nothing in the article as written to indicate if and why this poem would be relevant to the poem by Mao. Following the Cui Hao poem there is a very short statement quoted from Mao (unsourced) about the "historical context" of "Yellow Crane Tower." If I were to rewrite this section, everything I have would be speculation. I would have to speculate that the original author of the article included the information because common scholarly consensus on these poems is that Cui Hao's poem was an influence on Mao's poem, and that would still leave scant information for a full section devoted to this poem.

The other sections are similarly scant. The information in each section, when full quotations of poems which violate copyright were removed, do not constitute anything that seems to me to be of encyclopedic interest. Thus, I removed a great deal of content which was either irrelevant or not clearly relevant to Mao's poetry, and replaced it with the brief synopsis of what seemed relevant: that his poems were named for geographic features and followed his campaigning in the Chinese Civil War.

What we are left with is an article that does not cite any of its sources, which includes a great deal of information which is not relevant to the article title, which may also be excessively detailed.

Now, I've had a Wikipedia username for a while, but I haven't done much editing until recently. I admit that I may be unaware of the best procedures for this sort of thing, so I'm not just going to revert the article to the pared down version that I spent hours creating by carefully sifting through the sections in the original article and attempting to derive what was of encyclopedic interest. But I would ask you to read the two versions of the article more carefully and perhaps evaluate whether I deleted things "I personally didn't care for." An article cobbled together with snippets of things that don't belong on Wikipedia, with POV-influenced material of dubious relevance to the article title, etc., seems to be more of a problem than a bare-bones article.

I'm sorry if I sound annoyed. I'm sure that people delete things willy-nilly because they don't like them, and that reverting those deletions is important. But I didn't just delete content. I cut out things that obviously didn't belong (the full poems), and I didn't port them to Wikisource because they are not public domain. I deleted material which was irrelevant to the article title and attempted to summarize the salient points that were relevant.

Luna (talk) 14:50, 4 April 2012 (UTC)