Talk:Kanikōsen

Merge here?

@Charles Matthews: Regarding this, I'm wondering would it be better to merge the one sourced section of the Kanikōsen article in here? It's a painfully WP:RECENT article, and it's got a few other problems (the claim to "revival" is unsourced and questionable; a sudden surge in popularity of a book that never went away is not the same as a "revival"), and Kani Kōsen is a better title used in a very reputable pre-2007 English-language reliable source (the main one used in this article). In fact, it's so much better a title that I suspect the sources in the other article actually based their romanization on Wikipedia. That said, all but one of them are broken links so I haven't checked them; for all I know they follow Keene's spelling.

All of this is to say that I don't think there's much in the history of the other page worth preserving, and the title of the final merged version should be Kani Kōsen, not Kanikōsen. Maybe by means of a histmerge so the original creation date and creator are preserved, but with my text making the bulk of the article.

Full disclosure: I wrote this article for Wikipedia Asian Month without noticing, until this evening, that an earlier article existed, and I suspect my article being a kinda-sorta content fork (based on separate, better, sources and covering mostly different aspects of the topic) might disqualify it from the editathon. But this has nothing to do with why I think the other article should be merged into this one rather than vice-versa. If that was my game I would blank the merge tag and perhaps message you on your talk page, not here. And I wouldn't ping all the WAM judges so that full disclosure means full disclosure: User:Adityavagarwal User:Wfears User:SuperHamster User:Titodutta.

Hijiri 88 (聖やや) 12:19, 28 November 2017 (UTC)

@Hijiri 88: Thanks for transparency here. As of WAM, your article seems quite large so I would accept that. We may be wrong in the final result for you since our tool may not be able to handle the special case. If that ever happened, please let me know.--Fantasticfears (talk) 22:09, 5 December 2017 (UTC)

@Fantasticfears: Darn. Sorry. Didn't notice you'd responded. You can ignored that part of my message on your talk page. I'm not concerned about the length, since the submission tool checked that anyway. I'm concerned that since another article already existed on this topic (but I wasn't aware of it), my article might not qualify. Ultimately either way, the previous article will probably be de facto deleted and my version put in its place since the previous version is a mess, but the same could be said of a bunch of other already-existing bad articles I could have written over and they wouldn't have fitted into WAM rules. Hijiri 88 (聖やや) 23:06, 5 December 2017 (UTC)

@Hijiri88: I understand that. However, since you have mentioned you missed the previous article, I'm happy to make this a special case (aka. accepted). Thanks for putting effort in contributing more quality content.--Fantasticfears (talk) 23:00, 7 December 2017 (UTC)

Actually Kanikōsen seems to be the more common Romanisation: and of course the Japanese gives no help. As for the rest, do as you think best. Charles Matthews (talk) 15:21, 28 November 2017 (UTC)

Kanikōsen seems to be the more common Romanisation Are you sure? Yeah, the sources used in the other article all appear to use it, but all of them post-date the English Wikipedia article and several of them appear to be the type that might follow English Wikipedia on this point -- JT is a terrible source for Japanese literature topics, NYT is hardly a specialist source either, and SeekJapan doesn't seem to exist anymore but its successor "JapanZine" doesn't seem much better than the others. Keene's book, on the other hand, is authoritative and probably should have been the primary source used when the original article was written in 2007. Hijiri 88 (聖やや) 20:38, 28 November 2017 (UTC)

Hello all! I created the Kanikosen article all those years ago. Although I based it on a news article about its sudden resurgence, I felt at the time that the book was notable in itself. I was unaware that Kani Kosen was an alternative, otherwise I'd have created a redirect; I'll add my it's-not-a-vote to the "use the more popular Romanisation" side, as long as the other one gets a mention and all useful information is retained. I'm also rather surprised that my phrase "capitalist exploitation" has survived all this time despite its apparent bias. Sophie means wisdom (talk) x 16:33, 6 December 2017 (UTC)

ADDENDUM: It's probably best to use the more accurate version, even if there's a more popular incorrect version. a good comparison can be made with Proust's masterpiece, known by millions for decades as Remembrance of Things Past but which, as you can see, redirects to the more accurate, but much less famous, translation. Sophie means wisdom (talk) 16:42, 6 December 2017 (UTC)

@Sophie means wisdom: Thanks for commenting! Honestly, neither is "more accurate" and both can likely be found in scholarly sources in English and other European languages. My preference for the "two words" romanization is that (a) Donald Keene uses it, and his book is one of the better-regarded reference works on the topic in English (he likely outweighs all other academic coverage of the book in English between 1945 and 2000 combined -- this is definitely the case with most of the relatively obscure novels he discusses, and I think the present topic is one of those) and (b) both kani and kōsen are distinct words in Japanese, but most English readers wouldn't "get" that under the original article's title. As for the more popular or common name, that's probably very difficult to determine for a book that isn't "popularly" known even in Japan, let alone the English-speaking world, these days; a Googling will bring up a bunch of newspaper articles and references in books almost no one has read, and honestly the prevailing logic seems to be that WP:COMMONNAME is meant more for cases like Richard Starkey than cases where almost no one has heard of the topic and those who have are divided 60-40 (or even 70-30) between those who are more familiar with one spelling or another. Anyway: I'm planning on merging my content onto the original article and then opening an RM to preserve the ten-year page history at the new title, but getting the direct or even tacit approval of the original creator of the article in advance would make that process smoother. Hijiri 88 (聖やや) 02:26, 7 December 2017 (UTC)

You've obviously studied this a lot more closely than I have so I'll go along with your judgement. Go ahead! Sophie means wisdom (talk) 12:50, 7 December 2017 (UTC)