Forum / Wikipedia editing, anyone?

• 
  strannikov

  Feb 22, 12:13am

  The Wikipedia entry for Faulkner's "Red Leaves" informs readers that Faulkner patterned his story in some measure after Hemingway's DEATH IN THE AFTERNOON.

  As much credit as I'm willing to accord Faulkner, and as unprepared as I am to grant too much to Hemingway, I don't much think Faulkner would have taken his cue from Hemingway's work if in fact "Red Leaves" appeared in 1930 (Saturday Evening Post; in the collection THESE 13 in 1931) and Hemingway's discursive work was not published until 1932.

  If some enterprising someone . . .

• 
  James Lloyd Davis

  Feb 22, 12:54am

  There is a lesson in this. And it brings up an interesting question. Maybe several.

  Maybe another thread.

• 
  Marcus Speh

  Feb 27, 08:09pm

  @strannikov everybody can change Wikipedia entries. All changes are subject to scrutiny, at the very least by bots, for more important encyclopedic entries (like FAULKNER the writer etc) Wikipedia admins will keep a watchful eye out. A suggestion like this should be proven (many articles are flagged "contains original research", which means it cannot be encyclopedic (yet), this is the very least one can do to repaint said remark in colors of doubt.

  I checked the entry in question (http://bit.ly/YFu3fY) and the remark is taken from a 1999 biography by Jeffrey Meyers. When I followed its traces, I arrived at a 1985 NYT review by Raymond Carver (!) (http://nyti.ms/YFuDdE) who doesn't like the biography at all and considers it heavily biased (against Hemingway, not Faulkner). Other than that I cannot see anything that would make us doubt Meyers' inference (which you object to). In other words, one would have to "dig deeper", as E.F. Benson's Lucia might have said and look at Meyers' arguments.

  Your argument based on the times of publication sounds as if it might be worth doubting the paragraph in question. I know nothing about Faulkner and Hemingway so while I'm generally enterprising and, as you can tell, active in this space as you can tell (http://bit.ly/MSBwiki), I have nothing more to add, alas.

• 
  Marcus Speh

  Feb 27, 09:39pm

  [One might say that I have too much time on my hands but I assure you this is not the case—Wikis simply are a large part of my professional world.]

• 
  strannikov

  Feb 27, 11:11pm

  Marcus: thanks for considering and taking a look in your copious spare time. YEARS ago, I began looking into editing Wikipedia articles (I spotted a very unlikely portrait for G. B. Vico) and got a user p/w, which has long since disappeared from mind, et cetera, so I have not pursued.

  I like Wikipedia a lot and depend on it regularly, and it's rare to find an error that I'm capable of discerning. The pub dates I found came from my Portable Faulkner anthology and from my shelf copy of Oxford Companion to American Literature.

  Thank you, too, for the Schrodinger citation. (By the by: would you have heard when all-sky CMB data from the Planck anisotropy probe is to be released? The release postponements continue apace, and I'm eager to learn what the data will tell concerning the "dark flow" hypothesis of Kashlinsky, et al., regarding the "Alpha Concentration" [Norma Cluster, Great Attractor, Shapley Supercluster] gravitational anomaly.)

• 
  Marcus Speh

  Feb 28, 09:48am

  This one is exclusively for strannikov: http://bit.ly/12cW9Dy — I know as much about deep space probes as I know about other sort of probes that my urologist seems desperate to try on me (I have, as you'll be happy to hear, resisted so far and, in all honesty, the more I hear about 'probes' the less I feel like probing...my own, your, or the universe's cavities...).

  All hail the impervious data stream.

• 
  strannikov

  Feb 28, 01:25pm

  Thank you, Marcus, for the link. No more enamored of somatic probes than you, I have to guess, but recently I did enjoy viewing results of Werner Herzog's exploration of the Chauvet Caves.

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