AnneAnneAnne1485

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Please remember to sign your messages on talk pages by typing four tildes (~~~~); this will automatically insert your username and the date. If you need help, check out Wikipedia:Questions, ask me on my talk page, or click here to ask for help on your talk page, and a volunteer should respond shortly. Again, welcome! Deb (talk) 12:16, 1 May 2015 (UTC)

It would probably be a good idea if you read the guidelines on verifiability and the neutral point of view policy before making any further edits to articles on controversial topics. Deb (talk) 12:16, 1 May 2015 (UTC) I would also strongly recommend that you research how material should be cited on Wikipedia. Uncited content, or worse, content that does not match the cited sources, is not encouraged. WP is a summary of the reliable secondary literature. Carson doesn't therefore deserve to be prized ahead of the likes of Horrox, Hicks, Pollard etc, although it is only right that her book gets mentioned as an important and recent Ricardian work.86.148.183.89 (talk) 16:55, 3 May 2015 (UTC)

I don't understand your point. WP is only interested in "reliable" sources yet you claim that Hicks and others are reliable and Carson is not?

For a start, Carson is so obscure that she doesn't have a wikipedia article and all the others have. She is also, as you've stated, a "Ricardian", which makes her biased from the start by her own admission. Also, if you take a second look, you'll see it wasn't me that made the second comment above.Deb (talk) 07:43, 25 May 2015 (UTC)

PS. It also wasn't me that reverted your changes to the article. Please look at Wikipedia:Neutral point of view again. As I previously said, you need to be very careful how you phrase things when you are editing such a controversial article. Deb (talk) 07:46, 25 May 2015 (UTC)

Check out her book. She started out completely neutral. By that standard, that she is a Ricardian so she is biased then all authors that write about World War II must be suspect because they are too " pro American"

The fact she is a Ricardian in no way discounts her findings. The authors you mentioned - Hicks, Weir, therefore can be called Tudorists, and their findings called into question. The way the original article was phrased was not neutral and gives one assumption great validity.

I realize I probably won't change your mind about it, but thank you at any rate.

Perhaps it was not wise to refer to her as a Ricardian in the text of the article then - that immediately suggests bias. You're also suggesting that anyone who is anti-Ricardian is a "Tudorist" (new word?), which is also a non-sequitur. I think you need to examine whether your edits actually added anything to the article, which is a pretty detailed one and has been the subject of regular edit wars ever since it was created. All edits to that page now come under close scrutiny, and you can expect every word you write to be judged against both the NPOV standard and Wikipedia:Manual of Style. I hope this helps. Deb (talk) 16:03, 25 May 2015 (UTC)

The "Tudorist" label is used in response to the "Ricardian" label and ironic you have stated this because, since Carson does not agree with the majority, she is labeled a "Ricardian" The article is sourced with authors who have one narrow point of view and other authors are given no mention. The article assumes the princes were killed and any attempt to point out the other possibilities are barely allowed to be mentioned. Any attempt to do so is removed because the editors have disagree with those views. Thank you. You have verified what I originally believed by your statement that "anyone who is anti-Ricardian..." I never said that and in fact am pointing out that the labels are used to dismiss well researched works.

The use of the word "Tudorist" will continue to be used to indicate authors who write from the More, Shakespeare tradition of Richard did it, no further discussion is necessary. I don't see how this helps learning or indicative of a neutral point of view. It must be acceptable then to be a "Tudorist" but unacceptable to be Ricardian. This has been an enlightening experience. Thank you.

Hello again Anne (if I may):

There are two problems with your edits (1) that they are almost all unsourced - you appear very reluctant to add footnotes (which I suspect is why the edits were reverted) and (2) that you appear to consider 'neutrality' to mean 'giving all points of view equal weight'. That's not the case. Neutrality in fact means, in essence, 'fairly representing the way things are looked at at the moment by the majority of recognised scholars'. Now, we have several scholars - that is, people who are trained historians, who write history books professionally, and who hold various positions at different universities - mentioned in the Princes in the Tower article. Examples would include Horrox, Hicks, Pollard, Bennett, Baldwin and Starkey (in passing). These are preferred sources for Wikipedia for a number of reasons. First of all, such people tend to know the most about the field. They have to, for the simple reason that if they don't keep up to date with developments, continue to publish work and reinterpret information in light of new developments to a standard guaranteed by divers processes - peer review, REF or whatever they call it this week, appraisal, conference feedback - they get the sack. Baldwin, alone among scholars of this nature, draws back from accusing Richard of infanticide, although his conclusions are essentially the rather vague 'I don't know and I don't propose to speculate' which suggests a man who is trying to convince himself of the validity of this view. Of course, some are much, much more hostile to Richard than others. Hicks in particular goes a lot further than I personally would in accusing Richard of premeditating the whole usurpation and the appurtenant murders from before Edward even died. But generally, they are more cautious about making unsupported claims, more willing to check out new evidence that conflicts with their theories, and more likely to come to a reasoned conclusion based on sound analysis than those people who do not have such training or such positions.

However, this is also a field that attracts a lot of interest from people who are EITHER trained as historians but are not professional historians/scholars in the above sense - e.g. Weir and just possibly, if you stretch the definition, Gregory - OR who are not actually historians at all (Carson, Potter, possibly Kendall who was a professor of English Literature). Generally speaking, those people who are passionately interested in the subject of Richard are, like yourself, pro-Ricardian (a rare exception would be Desmond Seward, who is fiercely anti-Ricardian but is also not cited in the article at all). However, here we have an immediate problem. Does their passion for Richard to be acclaimed as a noble hero who is much misunderstood as the result of a lot of 'Tudor myth-making' (Phillippa Langley's words) guarantee their accuracy? I would suggest that the opposite is probably true.

That brings me to Carson, the source you seem to be relying on for the majority of your information. Carson's claims to objectivity while calling her book 'The Maligned King' are not perhaps terribly convincing. She (may I add I wouldn't be surprised to find I should be using a different pronoun?) may be convinced she is being objective, but even in doing so, she is perhaps unconsciously biasing herself against those sources/scholars whom she considers not to be objective. Carson, so far as I know, has no training in history and makes her living as a freelance author. Such people, by definition, need good sales to survive. What whips up sales? Controversy, and saying something new and radical. That's the absolute inverse of most historical writing, about 75% of which is building on what has gone before. You describe it in your above comment as 'well-researched.' That's not really something you or I can make a ruling on on WP (you could maybe find an academic review, if there is one, to back that up)? For my part, having the read the book, the result is both extremely speculative and frankly unconvincing. Her explanation for the Princes being smuggled abroad and not mentioned again to prevent them being a focus for opposition is absurd - had they been alive and a long way off, Richard would surely have brought them back in 1485 to finally destroy Henry Tudor's by now far more dangerous threat to his position. Her claims to objectivity were not matched by her angry denunciation of every source/scholar who criticises Richard (e.g. p. 222 says of Hicks that he 'sits squarely on the fence' for refusing to come to a definite conclusion on whether the dug up under Charles II are the princes or not, although that's also the position of Kendall, and sneers at him for saying something that is 'a safe conclusion if ever there was one!') coupled to almost hagiographic adulation for those who occasionally suggested ideas that support her own views. For example, on p. 323 she uncritically cites Walpole's view that Elizabeth Woodville had been helping Simnel, neglecting the small matter that he later retracted all his statements about Richard.

Does all this mean Carson does not deserve to be in the article? No. But it also means that as an untrained person pushing a fringe theory, she should not be particularly prominent - certainly not nearly as prominent as you are making her. That's a breach of WP's neutrality policy.

Finally, you complain elsewhere that you are dissatisfied about the state of the article. If you are, start a discussion on the article's Talk Page. This is one that has been gone over many times (check out the archives) but because it is controversial, it sometimes gets revisited. You could in theory also add a neutrality tag, but I would advise against that until you've discussed it with a few other editors. To get your point of view across, I would recommend finding some heavy-duty sources (not therefore Carson, for the reasons outlined above) to support it. I must admit I don't know of any modern ones off hand - Markham, Halsted and Buck are all really rather out of date - but if you can find any, I'd be interested to hear more about them.

Hope you find that useful. Apologies it's rather long - but you have covered quite a lot of ground and I wanted to do justice to the concerns you raised.

PS - in answer to your comments on 'Tudorist/Ricardian', Ricardian is an accepted label used by admirers of Richard to describe themselves. There is, so far as I know, no equivalent 'Tudorist' label. I have heard 'Henrician' used sometimes, but usually to refer to the period rather than the scholarship on it. That's why it's not in the article, and I would suggest unless you can find a source that shows it is in constant use, it's better avoided. Thanks.31.54.53.43 (talk) 17:59, 26 May 2015 (UTC)

Another suggestion - why not create a wikipedia article about Annette Carson yourself? If she is as accomplished as you suggest, it should not be difficult to find evidence of notability. That's assuming there is no conflict of interest, of course. Deb (talk) 19:17, 26 May 2015 (UTC)

An interesting suggestion. However, on an admittedly rapid Google search, the only items I can find to mention Carson other than her personal website and various blogs/sites linked to the RIII society are one article in the Telegraph on the new exhibition in Leicester, one in the Mail (not an RS) on the same subject) and this from the University of Leicester which is most intriguing:Annette is a writer with a preference for history and biography. Her initial area of study was music, which she abandoned in favour of a writing career. She has sold over 40,000 non-fiction books and has contributed to Encyclopaedia Britannica. Her lifelong interest in Richard III has involved continual reading and research, and in 2008 she published Richard III: The Maligned King (The History Press), an unconventional examination of his reign which questions the assumptions and certainties of traditional historians: "It's my belief we simply don't know as much as we're led to think we know about Richard III and his period," she explains, "and an open mind serves us better than one that runs along well-worn paths." That in itself raises fairly serious questions about some of the things that have been said about her distinction and objectivity.31.54.53.43 (talk) 07:26, 27 May 2015 (UTC)

Oh, sorry if I confused you - the suggestion was meant for the page owner.Deb (talk) 18:08, 27 May 2015 (UTC)

May 2015

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