User:Uncle G/From Egelantiersgracht to Britannica in a zillion easy steps

This isn't a tale of how bad Britannica is in comparison to Wikipedia. This is a tale of the collaborative editing, where things take one, and the article development process.

Random walks and Wiki Drmies Loves Furniture

Both Drmies and I take what are essentially random walks through Wikipedia, I through my work at AFD Patrol and Drmies through … well I do not actually know. But sometimes we actually find topics of interest and focus upon them. At User talk:Drmies, Drmies xyrself, the lurkers there, and I have embarked on many collaborative projects over the years, from disproving SilkTork's bold prediction in 2008 at Talk:Canals of Amsterdam#Red list that "full articles will not be written" on all of the individual canals in Amsterdam (by doing exactly that, and consequently reminding Drmies of xyr youth) to writing about religious figures in Mongolia, with a whole lot of others along the way, including lynchings, furniture and furniture makers (a calming subject that Drmies particularly enjoys as a respite from dealing with checkuser duties, vandalism, sockpuppeteers, and all sorts of other shenanighans), and Landings in California — but not yet the members of the Dutch Vacuum Society.

Finding these topics does not mean that the walks are any less random, though, because they often lead to strings of connected topics, sometimes long ones indeed. For example: An AFD discussion led to an Irish antiquarian, and thence to the biographies of two people from Limerick, connected together with section headings in the form of a Limerick, of course.

Such was where we started with Francis Orray Ticknor.

"Poet of the Confederacy"

Drmies had been following up on people who were called a "Poet of the Confederacy" and had found that Ticknor had been called "Georgia's Confederate Poet"; and xe consequently started an article and a DYK nomination page. I went and researched Ticknor, searching for potential sources and reading them, and came up with several more things that could be added to the article, which I showed to Drmies in the form of a list of alternative DYK questions, complete with sources. We had already discussed The Land We Love when Drmies had worked on Daniel B. Lucas, another "Poet of the Confederacy", but it did not have an article at the time. It had had exactly one redlink in the entire project, at Wikipedia:WikiProject Academic Journals/Journals cited by Wikipedia/L3, until I hyperlinked it on my talk page. It was almost, but not quite, the sort of subject, that we did not even know that we did not have an article on, that I have listed at User:Uncle G/Missing encyclopaedic articles over the years as I have discovered them.

This started another chain, from Ticknor and Lucas to Southern Magazine, which Drmies created incorporating The Land We Love as a section. (It still lacks much about the Eclectics at the time of writing this.) Drmies found Frank Luther Mott's A History of American Magazines, which is still one of the standard reference works on the subject, almost a century later, and created several new stub articles based upon pages 45–47 alone, including Scott's Monthly and Figaro (New Orleans).

This led to the subject of little magazines.

Expanding little magazine

At the time, this was a redirect to a section in literary magazine which itself looked like Special:Permalink/1061537623#Little magazines, 2 paragraphs sourced to the Oxford Research Encyclopaedia of Literature back in 2019, albeit that they had originally been written sans sourcing in the article for the Indian little magazine movement by mistake in 2010, as it wasn't really that article's scope at all, and then moved over (not actually to where that edit summary said, but to the introduction of literary magazine) in 2014, and only attached to the Oxford Research Encyclopaedia of Literature entry much later by someone else.

So off I went and made another of my little brown boxes. Initially, I was thinking of expanding the section in literary magazine with the brown box. Then I read the Morris and Diaz preface to The Little Magazine in Contemporary America that I had not used as a source and had only cited as further reading. It explained that little magazines were distinct from literary magazines (which is now in the article, so see there for how) and convinced me that an actual expansion of the little magazine from a redirect to an article was the way to go. Drmies obviously thought the same thing, because xe and I edit conflicted doing it. I had expanded upon what was in my little brown box along the way, which led to a larger introduction than the one that Drmies had summarized from what was in my little brown box.

And so the string went.

Drmies's original stub for South Atlantic (magazine) based upon page 46 of Mott, was moved to draft space, which spurred me to research both it and Carrie Jenkins Harris. In response, Drmies created Carrie Jenkins Harris. We both found that there was another Carrie Jenkins Harris, and I made yet another little brown box, with a semi-humourous {{confused}} at the top. Carrie Jenkins Harris became an equal weight disambiguation between Carrie Jenkins Harris (American writer and editor) the little magazine editor and Carrie Jenkins Harris (Canadian novelist) the Nova Scotian author. Thus was Template:Did you know nominations/Carrie Jenkins Harris (American writer and editor) born.

In the little brown box, I had listed Hoffman's, Allen's, and Ulrich's The Little Magazine: A History and Bibliography, a work that I had not used but that was definitely cited as prior work by several of the people whose works I had used. This led me to find Frederick J. Hoffman, an English professor whose life and works were well documented in a list of sources that I had found and who could be a further link in the chain.

A short aside on English professors is probably worthwhile at this point. It is a running joke of mine at User talk:Drmies that Drmies runs something called the English Professor Vacuum, created by a putative entire absence of any English professors at that page (obviously!), and designed to suck English professors into Wikipedia.

I also had plans for the South Atlantic Quarterly, not yet written at the time. But the Administrators' Noticeboard intervened.

The entire state of New Jersey owes me some articles.

To demonstrate a point about the pork roll article, that had come up on the Administrators' Noticeboard because a bad writer had perpetuated New Jersey's shibboleth disagreement on this instead of writing about it, and ironically an area that Drmies and some others have been historically interested in as part of a "bacon contest", I had to set aside a whole list of sources that I had dug up about the magazine, and its editors William Baskerville Hamilton and John Spencer Bassett, as well as the time that I planned for writing about them, and instead write about New Jersey people and pork roll.

The bacon contest, by the way, is why Ticknor's "Ye Rhyme of Ye Rustyc", which I put a few verses of in a sidebar for Drmies and which is all about the perils and consequences of a bacon diet instead of eating fruit, Ticknor having been a proponent of fruit growing in Georgia and fruit in one's diet, was apposite.

Drmies did a stub for South Atlantic Quarterly, but then distracted me, so it was only after doing a little brown box about Apollo 11 in popular culture, of all things, that I got to do a little brown box that became William Baskerville Hamilton, which Drmies proceeded to build upon significantly.

Francis Orray Ticknor had led to The Land We Love and a whole bunch of other little magazines, to two North American writers with the same name who died in the same year, the article on little magazines itself, a "Dukie" little magazine editor and history professor, and an English professor who studied little magazines that we still have not had the time to write the biography of.

Then I thought: Does our little magazine article show up on bing.com yet? Or is it still the old literary magazine section, not yet re-crawled? So I searched.

Up came Encyclopædia Britannica's article, as the very first search result.

Encyclopædia Britannica

• The Editors of Encyclopaedia Britannica (2003-07-25). "little magazine". Encyclopædia Britannica.
• "Little Magazine". The Columbia Encyclopedia (6th ed.). The Columbia University Press. 2016-08-24.

I had not seen the Britannica article until this point. I had seen the aforementioned Oxford Research Encyclopaedia of Literature's article on little magazines, but mostly I had been reading U.S. books on what is after all a primarily U.S. subject, a genre of thousands of magazines in the United States, from at least the Civil War onwards. It is documented in U.S. books on Southern Literature, and indeed in U.S. books directly on the subject of little magazines, Mott's and Hoffman's being two of the standard works on the subject; with the likes of professor Bes E. Stark Spangler (of William Peace University) expanding on the South and Shannon Ravenel carrying this through to the turn of the 21st century, and Morris and Diaz taking it into the 21st century.

Encyclopædia Britannica was a surprise.

I have never really bought into the idea that Wikipedia beats Britannica; it has always seemed rather too self-congratulatory, and not only do I know how bad things are in the areas where I know some stuff, the GNIS mess with Wikipedia publishing hundreds of thousands of outright false substub articles about geography (one of the largest topic areas in Britannica and probably one of the largest of Wikipedia's too) to the world for in many case over a decade is a fairly serious problem. (Lest we forget: the Scots Wikipedia fairly wrecked a language, too.) There are mountains of dreck in Wikipedia accrued over two decades. At Special:Diff/1062334/1019398789 I had to revert just shy of 18 years of rubbish to get responsibility assumption (AfD discussion) back on track with an actual subject. There was 1 useful revision in the entire edit history.

I am an account with a pseudonym. I do this as a hobby. I have not professed any sort of expertise in anything. The user page has been blank since 2005.

Surely Britannica will be like the Oxford Research Encyclopaedia of Literature? Surely it will be like the Columbia Encyclopaedia's article (which Bing also revealed) which has Hoffman et al. and Anderson and Kinzie in further reading just like I wrote? Surely it will be either a good source in its own right or at least a useful sanity check? Britannica is wholly on-line, now, does rolling updates, and should be no more limited by paper than Wikipedia is. It's also produced by a U.S. company. Surely it will know the U.S. side of a U.S. subject? Surely it will be current? Surely it will be comprehensive?

Surely we'll know who wrote it?

Sadly, it is "No." to all of the above.

Britannica's article has not been updated since 2003, and is one of the ones where Britannica by editorial policy did not state who its authors were. It has a Euro-centric bias to what is essentially a U.S. subject. It does not explain that little magazines are not limited to literary subjects; and it documents a history starting in 1890. But we know that The Land We Love, which is in the standard reference works (on the infamous page 46 of Mott), is one of a rush of Southern little magazines immediately post-bellum, with "A monthly magazine devoted to literature, military, history, and agriculture" in its very subtitle on its title page.

Where do these four principal periods come from? Well there are no sources nor further reading nor named authors, so there's no way of knowing. They certainly do not agree with Bes E. Stark Spangler's breakdown of the history, nor with Morris's and Diaz's various mimeograph, photocopier, and Internet revolutions. Indeed, Britannica just vaguely tails off in the 1950s. Little magazines did not. Shannon Ravenel has two synopses of the third and fourth quarters of the 20th century still to go at that point.

U.S. little magazines did not "serve to disseminate" — random dictionary link per Britannica — "information about and encourage acceptance of continental European literature and culture". They served to disseminate U.S. literature and culture. The Southern little magazines often dealt with the Lost Cause, for starters; and there was a huge torrent of domestic U.S. contributions that had to be beaten off with a stick. (Yes, one can beat a torrent off with a stick; ask the people who have been combatting the caste POV-pushers for years. We should start a little magazine devoted to the promotion of the mixed metaphor as the epitome of literary style. That said, it has probably already been done.)

I am an account with a pseudonym. I write the odd stub here and there. I know that my article is not (yet) comprehensive; there is more to the United States than the South, after all. Britannica should be able to do better than me. Even Wikipedia editors should be able to do better than me. (They have. Gävlebocken (AfD discussion) has improved over what I wrote. Indeed, then with FreddyFred and later with Drmies, Aymatth2, and many others, sometimes they even improve as I am writing.)

Wikipedia did even not have an article until 2022. It took Wikipedia editors 5 years just to give North Asia (AfD discussion), an entire region of the planet, more than 2 sentences. It took Wikipedia editors almost 10 years to get to Diogenes and Alexander (AfD discussion), and for 2 years prior the English Wikipedia had listed it unhelpfully under a title in Latin. We have, though, just leapfrogged over you, Encyclopædia Britannica, as did the Columbia Encyclopaedia with its 2016 article. It is probably time for some revision. ☺