User blog:George Dance/September 2015

Poetry is one of the leading poetry magazines in the United States and the world. It began in 1912, after Harriet Monroe convinced 100 Chicagoans to pledge $50 a year for five years to support a magazine. The magazine has published continuously until the present day.

Due to the ongoing extension of U.S. copyright, only the first 10 years of Poetry are in the public domain. Those were all added onto the web by Bartleby.com aa Poetry: A magazine of verse, 1912-1922. The Bartleby archive consists of an impressive 2,600 poems, many by such acknowledged masters as, Ezra Pound, Rabindranath Tagore, William Carlos Williams, Yvor Winters, and William Butler Yeats.

Our most current project, running through the summer, has been to add links to as many of those poets' articles as possible onto PPP. Since that meant going through every article on these poets, I also used the opportunity to add any upgrades (photos, lists of works, enhanced external links, etc.) that had been missed. Along the way I discovered quite a few poets without articles. Some had articles on Wikipedia, which could simply be copied in (and upgraded). But quite a few had to be written in from scratch. In the process, the number of PPP-original articles has risen to over 600.

I also began embedding videos where possible, using what could be found on YouTube. Some of the poems are LibriVox or other public-domain authors, while others (as with Pound, T.S. Eliot, and Edna St. Vincent Millay) are recordings of the poets reading their own work.

I also seized on the opportunity to finally work on the "About poems" module, the one major part of the Wiki that has received only scattered attention, by not only linking full lists of poems, but adding those I found most noteworthy to the wiki. Our 20th-century poems category, which previously consisted of little more than a dozen poems, now contains over 140.

Poems added were mostly given a standard format, which includes a template and a photo. The exceptions were for poems with PPP articles; in those cases the poems were merely added to the articles; not as textboxes, as per the older Wikipedia imports, but as the first section of the article, which was also given a unique photo.

Where I could find audio versions of the more than 100 new poems, I embedded those on the poem's page.

Those 140 poems can be accessed in bulk through this link, or individually through a new "Poems by..." section added to their authors' articles. The poems are in turn linked to their authors' articles, using the magic of Redirect.

IMO, the 20th-century section has gone from the most-neglected part of the wiki to one of the best. But don't take my word for it; I urge you to use this link and explore that section for yourself. George Dance (talk) 16:09, September 7, 2015 (UTC)