Completely Rewrite: Finnegans Wake

The article on Finnegans Wake is self-demonstrating and thus completely unreadable, to the point of being gibberish. For those of you not familiar with this book, it is notoriously difficult to read; I had an English professor who said he spent ten years trying to read the first page. Seriously. Unfortunately, our article is written in the same style, and takes that unreadability Up To Eleven. I don't what the article is saying. I don't have the knowledge of the book need to rewrite this article. I half-tempted to say delete all of it and start over.

Say no more.

That is pretty funny though.

EDIT: Having said that, I'd like to, at least, have the current description moved to whatever markup the old self demonstrating descriptions for The Toblerone and BRIAN BLESSED have been moved to. Just for Fun.

edited 8th Feb '11 3:39:21 PM by SeanMurrayI

I'm for the the self demonstrating version being moved to the proper Self-Demonstrating namespace, and a new clearer version in the main.

Reality is that, which when you stop believing in it, doesn't go away. -Philip K. Dick

Seconding everything Shimaspawn just suggested.

I agree the main article needs to be comprehensible. A joke is great, but let's not sacrifice the information for it. I'd say in Just for Fun, since Self-Demonstrating isn't an official namespace. .

edited 8th Feb '11 4:18:39 PM by Madrugada

...if you don’t love you’re dead, and if you do, they’ll kill you for it.

^Just for the record, the current self demonstrating article for BRIAN BLESSED is officially located at SelfDemonstrating/Ptitleijqobqvle9an.

edited 8th Feb '11 5:09:19 PM by SeanMurrayI

But there are only four articles in that namespace. There are over 300 on the Self-Demonstrating Article Index.

edited 8th Feb '11 5:19:02 PM by Madrugada

...if you don’t love you’re dead, and if you do, they’ll kill you for it.

Because almost everything in that index is in the Main.

Reality is that, which when you stop believing in it, doesn't go away. -Philip K. Dick

I was under the impression that pages in the Self-Demonstrating namespace were placed there because they're alternate versions of their main page counterparts.

Rhymes with "Protracted."

That is correct, and we only have about four of them.

Reality is that, which when you stop believing in it, doesn't go away. -Philip K. Dick

So, clearly, what we need is somebody familiar with the book to write a new description.

Rhymes with "Protracted."

The existing self-demonstrating article fails to have the stinger be an incomplete sentence completed by the first sentence of the description. This must be fixed, independent of any other actions.

The Toblerone wasn't moved to the Self-Demonstrating namespace, mainly because the name itself was changed to Boisterous Bruiser. There was no need for a namespace, because the article didn't duplicate anything.

There is, however, a Self-Demonstrating namespace version of Funetik Aksent.

And I, personally, am opposed to changing the Finnegans Wake article. It's genius as is.

edited 8th Feb '11 10:28:22 PM by alliterator

It's totally illegible. I can appreciate preserving it as a Self-Demonstrating alternate version, but the main page needs to be readable.

Rhymes with "Protracted."

Yeah, I'd like to be able to figure out what it's supposed to be about.

Trying to figure out what Finnegans Wake is about is like trying to figure out the meaning of life. Except that life is a book which is almost completely incomprehensible and contains words that often have quadruple meanings in multiple languages. And has a looping, dream-like writing style. Actually, it's not like trying to figure out the meaning of life at all.

Also, there's the fact that Finnegans Wake doesn't really have a plot or much a plot you can understand. It has characters and situations, but even The Other Wiki has trouble figuring out the plot. "The book treats, in an unorthodox fashion, the Earwicker family, composed of the father HCE, the mother ALP, and their three children Shem the Penman, Shaun the Post, and Issy. Following an unspecified rumour about HCE, the book, in a nonlinear dream narrative, follows his wife's attempts to exonerate him with a letter, his sons' struggle to replace him, Shaun's rise to prominence, and a final monologue by ALP at the break of dawn. The opening line of the book is a sentence fragment which continues from the book's unfinished closing line, making the work a never-ending cycle." And that's pretty much the entire narrative, but the actual book itself contains a whole lot more.

And the self-demonstrating article isn't incomprehensible, you just have to read it carefully. It actually explains a lot about the book and the author.

edited 8th Feb '11 10:47:25 PM by alliterator

Frankly, I think it does the book a disservice by taking tropers who might otherwise be interested in learning more about the book and what it is and slapping them in the face with a smug smirk. "Go read The Other Wiki and leave us in our cleverness!" it practically screams.

Not to say what's there now has to leave the wiki behind entirely — just that I wonder to what extent we want to leave behind, y'know, imparting information in favor of being "cool."

The article actually makes the book more intriguing to me. Describing it in dry terms made me not want to read the book, but reading the summary in the same dreamlike looping style actually made me interested in reading it.

Only if you're intrigued enough to try to make sense of it to begin with. You may be approaching it too much from the POV of someone who already knows what it's about.

How's this for a start: Sandbox.Finnegans Wake

edited 8th Feb '11 11:06:29 PM by troacctid

Rhymes with "Protracted."

True, I already knew something about the book before I read the article. But think about this: if you know nothing about a work of fiction, what article are you going to look at first, TV Tropes or Wikipedia?

Me: I look at Wikipedia to see what the book is about; then, if interested, read the book and look it up on TV Tropes.

TV Tropes, because odds are, that's where I found out that it even exists.

TV Tropes because The Other Wiki's media coverage is seriously lacking thanks to their "notability" standards which ban them from writing about anything interesting.

Reality is that, which when you stop believing in it, doesn't go away. -Philip K. Dick

Troaccid, that's a good start.

...if you don’t love you’re dead, and if you do, they’ll kill you for it.

Honestly, I think Alliterator's post would be a great plaintext description.

I didn't write any of that.