Talk:R. H. Wilenski

A fact from R. H. Wilenski appeared on Wikipedia's Main Page in the Did you know column on 3 August 2018 (check views). The text of the entry was as follows:

Did you know... that despite never completing his university studies, R. H. Wilenski was appointed a special lecturer in the history of art at the University of Manchester?

A record of the entry may be seen at Wikipedia:Recent additions/2018/August. The nomination discussion and review may be seen at Template:Did you know nominations/Reginald Wilenski.

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Selected publications

A request for citations was placed on the "selected publications" section saying that it needs lots more references. The sourcing here is self-evident: The Modern Movement in Art by R. H. Wilenski (Faber & Gwyer, London, 1927) is a citation for the fact that "The Modern Movement in Art" was written by R. H. Wilenski. If the request is for a citation to a source which selects only these publications from the subject's work then this would make the list a copyright violation unless the source happened to be in the public domain, see here. Hut 8.5 07:04, 2 August 2018 (UTC)[reply]

Indeed, adding a refimprove tag to a section consisting entirely of a list of references makes no sense. – Joe (talk) 08:03, 2 August 2018 (UTC)[reply]

@Hut 8.5 and Joe Roe: What are the criteria for being listed as a selected publication? I searched for a guideline or similar to explain why we use these types of sections and I came out empty handed. Shouldn't we have a reference to show that this particular piece of work is notable enough to be listed, but not enough to warrant its own article? Anarchyte (work | talk) 08:09, 2 August 2018 (UTC)[reply]

I don't know, I had nothing to do with writing it. But I'm not aware of any guidelines and my understanding from editing similar articles is that it's simply a matter of editorial judgement. You can get an idea of which works are the more significant ones from the sources about the person. Or you can look at the number of times it's been cited/discussed by others (I often do that with academic biographies). I don't believe that notability is a consideration; see WP:NNC. I've never seen a selected publications section referenced before, unless it's a reproduction of a published bibliography. – Joe (talk) 08:18, 2 August 2018 (UTC)[reply]

I'm not aware of any guidelines on the subject and I believe it's largely down to editorial judgement, supplemented by evidence that the work is significant e.g. mentions in other works, awards received, whether the work passes our notability guidelines, etc. Sometimes articles about people just list all their works or all their works of a certain type, which makes the decision easier if there aren't too many. The tagger here was explicitly after a citation that the works were all written by Wilenski [1] though. Hut 8.5 17:29, 2 August 2018 (UTC)[reply]