Talk:Wuffa of East Anglia

GA Review

This review is transcluded from Talk:Wuffa of East Anglia/GA1. The edit link for this section can be used to add comments to the review.

Reviewer: Grandiose (talk · contribs) 17:50, 30 December 2011 (UTC)

It looks very good. Just changing one or two licencing details with the images, but otherwise looks very good. Obviously it's short, but I am satisfied that, given the subject, this is not a problem. Grandiose (me, talk, contribs) 17:50, 30 December 2011 (UTC)

Well, I've had to remove an image with sourcing problems which hopefully the uploader can fixed but they haven't got back to me yet so I think the best thing is to pass without, and then you can read if and when the sourcing is improved (or replaced). Grandiose (me, talk, contribs) 19:58, 4 January 2012 (UTC)

Clearly, "GA review" is about licencing details and punctuation, but they would never presume to even glance at article content... --dab (𒁳) 12:40, 6 December 2012 (UTC)

Sorry, dab, is there a problem? I went through everything, there was just no point running through things that were fine. The one issue which I thought might be controversial, the article's overall length, I considered carefully and that's why it gets a mention. Grandiose (me, talk, contribs) 15:32, 6 December 2012 (UTC)

OK, well, I've had a look at some of your deletions I have to say I can't identify what's wrong with the passages. For example,

• A lack of documentary evidence prevents scholars from knowing if Wuffa is anything more than a legendary figure and the true identity of the first East Anglian king cannot be known with certainty. The historian Martin Carver has argued that Wuffa is "best regarded as an emblematic figure personified from royal origin-myth"...Later East Anglian kings claimed their right to rule by being descended from Wuffa, in the same way that the Kentish kings claimed descent from Oisc. (deleted)
• The kingdom of the East Angles was an independent and long-lived Anglo-Saxon kingdom that was established after migrants arrived in southeast Suffolk from the area now known as Jutland. Rainbird Clarke identified Wehha as one of the leaders of the new arrivals: the East Angles are tentatively identified with the Geats of the Old English poem Beowulf. Historians have used sources such as the Anglian collection to as an aid in calculating a date for the establishment of the kingdom. Collingwood and Myers note the use of both literacy sources and archaeological finds as evidence in how the region was settled during and after the 5th century, when various disparate groups arrived in Norfolk and Suffolk from different parts of the coast and the rivers of the Fens. (deleted: "rm further terrible prose about East Anglia in general, apparently with no other purpose than to inflate word-count.")
• The kingdom of the East Angles was bordered to the north and east by the North Sea, to the south by mainly impenetrable forests and by the Fens marshes on its western border. The main land route from East Anglia would at that time have been a corridor, along which ran the prehistoric Icknield Way. The Devil's Dyke (near modern Newmarket) may have at one time formed part of the kingdom's western boundary, but its construction cannot be dated accurately enough to establish it as of Anglo-Saxon origin. (as above)

There is considerable value to the reader to have some background on what he was, or was supposed to have been by legend, if you prefer, king of. Maps and descriptions of kingdoms are a regular feature of good (and featured) articles about monarchs. The prose is adequate by my reading, so I don't understand what you mean by "terrible prose" - it appears to be in good English, with proper referencing. I think your other complaints stem from your doubt that this man ever existed. The article before you deleted these sections did indeed discuss whether he was real, and expressed doubt at the relevant points. The sources provided in the article demonstrate no overwhleming consens against him actually existing: Carver, page 5: It seems reasonable to accept that Wuffa was a genuine historical figure; Collingwood again treats him as actually existing. THerefore it does not seem unreasonable for our article to proceed as if he were real, noting the doubts expressed as appropriate (it being rather difficult to proceed on the basis he does not expressing doubts that he does). Grandiose (me, talk, contribs) 15:58, 6 December 2012 (UTC)

Contradictory?

"which instead names his son Wehha..." I thought Wehha was his father? - Jarry1250 ^{[Deliberation needed]} 20:25, 1 January 2012 (UTC)

I know you added a bit to explain, but i still think it's contradictory: "Historia Brittonum... names Wehha as the first ruler" "Guillem Guercha ... was the first king of the East Angles ... Guercha was a distortion of the name Uffa, or Wuffa" doesn't that mean Wuffa's the first ruler? Yours confused, Grandiose (me, talk, contribs) 23:32, 2 January 2012 (UTC)

Recent editing

I note that a large part of the article was cut. I have restored the article, which is listed as 'good', whilst retaining the proposal to merge the article with another one. Am I not right in believing that a consensus should have been reached before the article was altered so drastically? I am of course quite happy to improve the text if I am provided with guidance that is a little clearer than, "who writes this stuff?"... Hel-hama (talk) 22:06, 6 December 2012 (UTC)

Dbachmann, I notice that after I reverted your edits, you then made edits which included changing the lead section so that it differs significantly from the previous version and removing the GA icon. Two templates have since been added. I agree with the comments made by Grandiose in Talk:Wuffa of East Anglia/GA1 following the deletions you made. We appear to be within a WP:BRD cycle, and I would therefore be grateful if you could explain your concerns more fully than you have in your edit summaries. We can then perhaps work together to reach a consensus. Hel-hama (talk) 20:30, 7 December 2012 (UTC)

Merger proposal

A template proposing that this article is merged with Wuffingas has been added to the article. No merger rationale has yet appeared, the Wuffingas article been not given an appropriate merger tag, users involved in the affected pages have not yet been notified, etc.. If the proposer feels unsure of the correct process to adopt, I suggest this link, which might prove useful. Hel-hama (talk) 19:57, 7 December 2012 (UTC)

The following discussion is closed. Please do not modify it. Subsequent comments should be made in a new section. A summary of the conclusions reached follows.

The result of this discussion was to request that an administrator who is not involved make a determination as to whether consensus has been established. Hel-hama (talk) 09:06, 19 February 2013 (UTC)

---

• Oppose - The Anglo-Saxon kings of England all have their own article, whereas Wuffingas deals with an entire dynasty of kings, spanning centuries and ending with Ælfwald of East Anglia in 749. Individual kings and dynasties deserve to be given different articles. Hel-hama (talk) 19:57, 7 December 2012 (UTC)
  • I am sorry, who says that "The Anglo-Saxon kings of England all have their own article"? What sort of criterion is that? A king gets his own article if there is material for an article. I.e. all historical kings, who have an actual biography. If the "king" consists of nothing more than a name in a genealogical list, there cannot be an article. If you try to write one regardless, the result will invariably be the type of tepid journalism without any actual content (other than off topic content ripped from neighboring articles) for which this page is a classic example. Please don't fall into the trap of postulating rules like "all in category X deserve an article". WP:NOTE doesn't work like that. If there is to be an article, there needs to be material for an article. This works on a case-by-case basis. An item in a list does not provide material for an article, even if the list deserves an article. This is the best way towards cluttering Wikipedia with useless substubs with no potential. --dab (𒁳) 11:12, 8 December 2012 (UTC)
  • the natural way of creating a "Wuffa" article, in keeping with how Wikipedia works and encyclopedic content expands, would go something like: "wow, the 'Wuffa' section at 'Wuffingas' has become really long and heavy with excellent content, it really starts to weigh down the article on the dynasty. It may even be time to branch it out into a standalone article." The way it doesn't work, or at least shouldn't if it weren't for editors who were misled by the idea that article count is the measure for progress, is that you dump a placeholder stub for 'Wuffa' with a single line of content, and then let it sit there with a 'stub' notice for the next ten years, imagining that some day somebody will turn it into an article. When in reality, of course, the only way of expanding your substub will be to integrate it into its larger context, which in our jargon translates to "merge". This tendency to create "one stub per term" is rather natural, especially for novice editors, but it is easily fixed by experienced editors. Things really get annoying when people begin to actively campaign against fixing it, I can only imagine becasuse they assume reducing the number of pages means reducing the level of content(?). But the pinnacle of annoying behaviour is when people turn a stub without potential into a piece of bad journalism (a.k.a. WP:COATRACK) and feed it to the "good article review" drones just so they can pin a medal to their userpage or something. You will end up with a worthless piece of journalism decorated with clip-art illustrations which summarizes random bits from loosely related subjects. It will not add anything to the pedia, but people will spend time on reviewing its punctuation and formatting, and in the end it will be considered a valid article to everybody who casts a casual glance, but not to those who bother to actually read it. If we believe that our articles are here to impart encyclopedic information (which is sort of why we are here, if you remember), I suppose we could agree that articles should be about something. Let's leave to the journalists tasks like 'write a polished 300 words on nothing in particular." --dab (𒁳) 11:21, 8 December 2012 (UTC)

You have misunderstood me if you thought I said all the kings deserved an article, I simply noted that they all do have them - even Hun of East Anglia, who seems never to have existed! I agree with you that there should be sufficient material on a case-by-case basis, as you put it, but the very nature of some subjects is that there is sometimes very little material to go on, especially when the subject is a person like Wuffa who - if he lived at all - ruled a society without contemporary written records. It's fascinating stuff that is of real interest to me. Hel-hama (talk) 17:20, 8 December 2012 (UTC)

• Comment. My own preference is, like dab's, to have articles which can't have much content directly related to their topic merged to a related article. However, this isn't a consensus among editors. See this discussion for example. I recall replacing a short article on a king (of Mercia, I think) with a redirect to the king list a few years ago, but I was reverted. Some people feel strongly that it's better to have a permanent stub which at least provides a landing page and allows the reader to jump to the appropriate next article in a more controlled way than a redirect. There are other, rather more OCD arguments, which I don't think are worth much, such as "it would leave a black link in the kings template" (there's a comment like that in the discussion linked above, for example). The problem with leaving a stub is that editors like Hel-hama come along in good faith and try to make the article the best it can be, because they're interested in the topic. I think dab is overstating the case against the article a bit; if this article were the place a reader came to find out about Wuffa, and that reader had never heard of Anglo-Saxons or East Anglia or the Wuffingas, this article in its current form would provide useful background that would help the reader make sense of the information without having to follow links. The argument in support of that is WP:NOTPAPER: why does it matter if the same text appears in multiple articles, so long as the reader gets what they need? (You can see an example of this sort of duplication in Astonishing Stories and Super Science Stories, which are both FAs; they share a long paragraph with few changes because it describes a common segment of their history.) Overall I agree that there is a bit too much here, some of which would be better in Wuffingas. I think a good next step would be to post a discussion section somewhere like Talk:Wuffingas, and post a link to that on the talk pages of all the relevant articles, and on WP:ASE, with a proposed restructuring of all the articles -- that is, list which articles would become redirects, which would be shorter, and what topics would be covered where. If you get consensus on that you have confidence that you can start work on reorganizing the articles without wasting your time. I'd be willing to support any coherent structure which had editors willing to work on implementing it. Mike Christie (talk - contribs - library) 14:12, 8 December 2012 (UTC)

Agreed. Hel-hama (talk) 17:20, 8 December 2012 (UTC)

• Oppose - There is sufficient material in the Wuffa article to allow it to stand alone, and of course the Wuffingas article outlines the placement of each member of the dynasty. Whether there should be an article for each member of the dynasty is not the question; but the only apparent (and unstated) rationale for merging the two articles is that the individual is eponymous with regard to the dynasty. It actually and rationally makes no more organizational sense to merge Wuffa into the dynastic article than it does to merge in any of the other members of the dynasty. Ishel99 (talk) 14:49, 9 December 2012 (UTC)

The discussion above is closed. Please do not modify it. Subsequent comments should be made on the appropriate discussion page. No further edits should be made to this discussion.