Talk:The Rivers and Beacon-Hills of Gondor

Notability etc

discussion moved from User talk:BrownHairedGirl#The_Rivers_and_Beacon-Hills_of_Gondor

I'm still puzzled by the placement of a non-notable and refimprove tag on The Rivers and Beacon-Hills of Gondor. First, I presume you realise it is not an article about fictional locations, but is an article about an essay written by Tolkien. Secondly, if you read the article, it actually establishes notability and sources in the text. It doesn't use inline citations to establish notability and sources, but it doesn't need to because the text already says the following: (1) Written by Tolkien - inspired by a letter from a reader - led to a later story. (2) Verification is satisfied by a citation to where it has been published (Vingwar Tengwar 42). Sure, this article is never going to be much more than a short entry, but as it stands it is actually one of the better articles. Compare it to something like Ósanwe-kenta, or some of the more stubby entries in Category:Essays by J. R. R. Tolkien. Carcharoth 00:55, 30 October 2007 (UTC)

I'm afraid that I don't see how those points relate to notability.

1) Written by Tolkien is an identification detail, not evidence of notability
Inspired by a letter from a reader: that's background info, which should be sourced. (I have added a {tl|fact}} tag there (and others elsewhere)

2)Publication is not evidence of notability; publication is in most cases what allows others to become aware of a document's existence, but I have myself published several papers which are as notable as a drop of water in the Atlantic, because nobody else wrote about them (some of my other work is very widely cited, but not everything hits the big time). There are mountains of books published very year which is notable only for being pulped, which is why WP:BK sets some thresholds derived from the general notability criteria at WP:NOTE

What we have here is not even a book, just an unfinished essay which according to the article may not be much more than an expanded letter. I suppose that at a pinch, someone could argue that it could be considered under item 5 of Wikipedia:Notability (books)#Criteria, but as an essay it lacks an ISBN number, so it is automatically excluded from notability by the threshold standards.

Not only does this essay fail any notability test, so far I can see it is unlikely to be capable of being expanded enough to pass. I suggest that it would be much better to fold this and nearly all the other articles in Category:Essays by J. R. R. Tolkien into a combined article named something like "Essays and letters of JRR Tolkien". --BrownHairedGirl (talk) • (contribs) 02:39, 30 October 2007 (UTC)

My feeling about lists and merged articles is that the items should be related. The essays are distinct enough that I think a category of short articles is better than a list, though a separate chronological listing would also be good, probably as part of a wider bibliographical article. Not all short articles should be merged. I think the essential problem here is that I, personally, from knowledge of the field have this mental image of what is notable and not notable within the field of Tolkien studies, fandom and scholarship (and there is lots that is not notable), but your gut instinct, regardless of what you know about a subject area, seems to be to reach for the stable of notability guidelines and start measuring an article against a set of criteria. In this case, you went for Wikipedia:Notability (books), but this is not a book. Category:Essays might be a better starting point for a notability guideline on essays. Tolkien's essays are mostly published in The Monsters and the Critics, which is a plausible merge destination. Some of the minor works have never been published separately, but appear in collected form (some more than once), such as Tales from the Perilous Realm, The Tolkien Reader, and Tree and Leaf. Some, like The Homecoming of Beorhtnoth Beorhthelm's Son were first published elsewhere, in this case in an academic journal. Similarly, lots of the posthumous material (after The Silmarillion, which was also posthumous) was collected in Unfinished Tales, and The History of Middle-earth series. But outside of that, there are scraps of new material that have been published, and this essay is one of them, the other being Ósanwe-kenta. Even though there are 12 volumes in The History of Middle-earth, there are elements within that where people have started separate articles, see Category:The History of Middle-earth. The issue of where to draw the line there also needs to be considered. I accept that the notability still needs work, but I disagree on the lack of references. I'll raise that back on your talk page, as it concerns two separate articles. Carcharoth 08:49, 30 October 2007 (UTC)

The inspiration for the article

The story that this article was inspired by a letter from Paul Bibire is consistent with Paul's own account of events, which he related to me first hand, and the reply which Tolkien sent him to his enquiry, which he showed me, probably around 1999. I'm not sure how to include this information in the Wikipedia formatting though--anyone want to help? Alarichall (talk) 15:23, 19 December 2008 (UTC)