Purpledaisy2000
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Your edits on Sonnet 30
editHi Purpledaisy2000,
I noticed that you've been editing Sonnet 30 and that you've been involved in a disagreement with another editor regarding its content, and that you two have been reverting each other's edits. This is fine and a normal part of editing on Wikipedia: we call it the Bold, Revert, Discuss cycle. The "bold" part of that is that everyone are encouraged to edit any article, because that is how improvements are made. If everyone hesitated or were afraid to make a change, even small spelling error would languish for years. Wikipedia just passed 5,000,000 articles so it's entirely impossible to maintain all of them if we do not gladly take all the help we can get.
The flip side to that is that not all edits are good edits, and not all editors will agree on what constitutes a good edit, and certainly not on what is the best edit for the article in question. For an edit to be reverted is thus perfectly normal and part of the cycle that produces better articles: either the original edit was a bad idea, or the disagreement spurs a discussion that leads to an even better article.
However, all that is founded on the third part of the cycle: Discuss. If editors who disagree on the best way to edit an article do not actually stop to discuss their disagreements, opting instead to just endlessly revert each other, the article gets no better and everyone involved just gets frustrated. That's why reverting more than 3 times in a row is not allowed, as one of the very few bright line rules on Wikipedia.
In your editing of the "Sonnet 30" article you exceeded that limit (here, here, and here), and thus you are in violation of the three-revert rule. Since this is a bright-line rule, this often leads to a block in order to prevent disruption to the project. I assume, since you're relatively new to the project, that you were not aware of this rule, or of the strong encouragement to discuss disagreements on article talk pages, that are part of the culture here on Wikipedia. As the policy page on the three-revert rule says, the expected action on inadvertently violating this rule is to self-revert the article back to the previous state and then take the discussion to the article's talk page. --Xover (talk) 20:10, 1 November 2015 (UTC)
Hi Xover,
Thank you very much for alerting me about this problem. I was unaware that I was exceeding the limit of edits; I was trying to revise the article so I could renominate it for GA status. I appreciate your suggestions and will try to find a way to make sure I don't let that happen again, possibly by contacting the other editor of the article and discussing the changes with him/her.
Thanks again, Purpledaisy2000
Thank you for your edits to the 'Sonnet 30' Wikipedia article
editHello, Purpledaisy2000 - Thank you so much for your recent edits to 'Sonnet 30'. (Xover has mentioned that you are participating in a student class project to improve that Wikipedia entry.) It is always gratifying to me, as one who formerly taught Shakespeare, whenever another takes an interest in "the Bard of Avon", and your efforts working to improve the 'Sonnet 30' article are indeed admirable. I encourage you to continue, as I am confident that you will (as I have) find delving into Shakespeare to be inexhaustibly rewarding, and I share your hopes for 'Sonnet 30" achieving GA status. --- Professor JR (talk) 08:44, 2 November 2015 (UTC)
Sonnet 30's legacy in other literature
edit@Purpledaisy2000: - You probably know that Shakespeare's works have been the source of innumerable later literary allusions, as well as the source for the titles of many other authors' works. Examples abound: John Steinbeck's Now is the Winter of our Discontent (Richard III); Thomas Hardy's Under the Greenwood Tree (As You Like It); Aldous Huxley's Mortal Coils (Hamlet); Nathaniel Hawthorne's Twice-Told Tales (King John); T. S. Eliot's "The Hollow Men" (Julius Caesar); Agatha Christie's Absent in the Spring (Sonnet 98); Anthony Burgess' Nothing Like the Sun (Sonnet 130) --- on & on (cf. List of titles of works taken from Shakespeare).
It may be of interest to you, in connection with your student project, to know (as Xover and I have discussed) that the second line of the first quatrain of Sonnet 30 provided the inspiration for C. K. Scott Moncrieff's title Remembrance of Things Past for his English translation (publ. 1922-1931) of French author Marcel Proust's monumental novel in seven volumes, À la recherche du temps perdu (publ. 1913-1927). This was intended by Moncrieff as both a tribute to Shakespeare and to Sonnet 30, and as quite apropos, in that the major thematic elements of Proust's work are very similar or analogous to those of Sonnet 30.
Mention of this fact would perhaps be pertinent in the Sonnet 30 Wikipedia article, maybe in a section entitled "Legacy in other literature", or some such. I always mentioned this in my classes when teaching Shakespeare, as it had always been mentioned by my own Shakespeare professors at university when we got to Sonnet 30. Regards, and happy editing. --- Professor JR (talk) 09:47, 2 November 2015 (UTC)
Hello Professor JR, Thank you very much for your suggestions. I was not aware of that Sonnet 30 was in any of those works that you mentioned - it sounds very interesting. However, as you've probably noticed in the edits I have made, my main focus for the Sonnet 30 article is to examine the sonnet itself as well as the circumstances surrounding it when it was written (i.e. historical context). On that note, while I'm sure that mentioning other works in which Sonnet 30 is mentioned would be nice, my main focus for the edits I make in the article pertains more to the actual sonnet rather than other works that are inspired and/or reference the sonnet. But again, thank you very much for your suggestions; I will keep them in mind as I continue editing the article. Purpledaisy2000 (talk) 03:01, 4 November 2015