Talk:She Shoulda Said No!/Archive 1

Archive 1

Additional image

If the article expands, there may be a point where the image to the right (removed for now - bdj) may add to the article. I stored it here until that time. -- Jreferee 15:54, 29 November 2006 (UTC)

This DVD cover collage captures the range emotions for which the movie was intended but failed to achieve.-- Jreferee 23:28, 30 November 2006 (UTC)

Are you so certain? Given it's success, I wouldn't be so sure. To a person living in this day & age, it probably does fail but it may have very well done so to a majority of 1949 audience Nil Einne 01:37, 1 December 2006 (UTC)

Good Article PASS

• Not sure what this sentence is intended to mean:"...in a series of scenes designed to procure a reaction from the audience in terms of relations with the opposite sex as well as other tragic happenings." Please clarify.
• Otherwise everything looks good. Good work!

--Ling.Nut 03:06, 16 December 2006 (UTC)

• • That does look a little rough, doesn't it? I'll adjust it tomorrow when I'm more awake. Thanks for the review! --badlydrawnjeff talk 05:44, 16 December 2006 (UTC)

Quotation marks

Are the quotation marks actually part of the title? That is, the ones enclosing the full title, not the ones around the word No.) —tregoweth (talk) 04:33, 6 June 2007 (UTC)

• Yes, they are. It's a very annoying title, haha, but I have triple checked this against numerous primary sources. --badlydrawnjeff talk 04:38, 6 June 2007 (UTC)
  • We're not compelled to follow unusual orthography, per the general naming conventions and WP:MOSTM. I'm going to make the move, but feel free to revert and discuss; it would also be good if you could share your sources for independent scrutiny. Many thanks, Girolamo Savonarola (talk) 21:17, 28 November 2007 (UTC)
    • I assume Badly Drawn Jeff is going off of the actual title of the film. The sources in the article itself appear to also go along with the actual title. It also appears that this article was ranked as one of the best on the project at the old title - should we really have it here if the apparently heavy use of redirects gets anyone to where they need to be? Ed Wood's Wig (talk) 01:36, 29 November 2007 (UTC)
    • It also appears that you created about a dozen broken redirects in the process of this move. I'm going to move it back to the old title until we resolve this in the meantime. Ed Wood's Wig (talk) 01:37, 29 November 2007 (UTC)

I have moved the article back to its proper name until some more discussion occurs. Per the Wikipedia:Naming_conventions#Special_characters page, "should" be avoided doesn't mean "must" in the sake of accuracy, and according to "controversial names," the policy says "If an article name has been stable for a long time, and there is no good reason to change it, it should remain. Especially when there is no other basis for a decision, the name given the article by its creator should prevail. Any proposal to change between names should be examined on a case-by-case basis, and discussed on talk pages before a name is changed." Ed Wood's Wig (talk) 14:31, 16 April 2008 (UTC)

Fine, then. Let's bring this to WP:RM and divine the consensus. Girolamo Savonarola (talk) 17:06, 16 April 2008 (UTC)

Requested move

The following discussion is an archived discussion of the proposal. Please do not modify it. Subsequent comments should be made in a new section on the talk page. No further edits should be made to this section.

The result of the proposal was move. JPG-GR (talk) 18:50, 21 April 2008 (UTC)

"She Shoulda Said 'No'!" → She Shoulda Said No! — Per Wikipedia:Naming conventions#Special characters (Separate accent-like and/or quote-like characters (including, but not limited to ʻ, ʾ, ʿ, ᾿, ῾, ‘, “, ’, ”, c, combining diacritical marks combined with a "space" character,...) should be avoided in page names.); Wikipedia:Naming conventions#Avoid non alpha-numeric characters used only for emphasis (page names should not begin with non alpha-numeric (A-Z,0-9) characters used solely for emphasis; cf examples); Wikipedia:Naming conventions (The names of Wikipedia articles should be optimized for readers over editors, and for a general audience over specialists); and Wikipedia:Manual of Style (trademarks) (Follow standard English text formatting and capitalization rules, regardless of the preference of the trademark owner). Overprecision here is an error, since it has always been common practice with typewriters to use quotation marks to denote a title; this generally does not confer any sort of official title status on the quotation marks. Furthermore, this has negative implications for the search function, which uses the quote marks for different purposes. It also fails the reader test as it is unreasonable to expect an average reader to enter the title with quotation marks. —Girolamo Savonarola (talk) 17:26, 16 April 2008 (UTC)

• Support - compare posters of Vertigo, Raging Bull, Casablanca, City Lights, and Touch of Evil, to name a few. See also Talk:Clerks#Requested move, regarding the application of WP:MOSTM to film title orthography. Girolamo Savonarola (talk) 17:43, 16 April 2008 (UTC)
• Question - I don't understand why the quotes are being used in the title. Is the title supposed to be a quote? If so, perhaps the quotes in the title are needed. But if the quotes are there just because there are quotes in the poster-- which was pretty common practise-- then no, they don't belong in the title. (Unrelated quesion: I'm not sure-- but I think have access to a poster image of the film released as The Devil's Weed - I hesitate to add it to an FA, but do editors here think it would be appropriate?) Dekkappai (talk) 19:22, 16 April 2008 (UTC)
• Support (Move to no-quotes) I see the discussion above in which badlydrawnjeff says he's triple-checked against primary sources, but he provides no citations... And in any case, Wikipedia should be encyclopedic in format. So, checking against print-sources, I see Starks, Cocaine Fiends and Reefer Madness, p.104 mentions the movie as (without quotes) "She Shoulda Said No-- But She Didn't (1949) is more generally known by its later title Wild Weed..." Kane, The Phantom of the Movies' Videoscope p.513, has the title, alphabetically, without quotes. And, finally, the more encyclopedic Video Source Book 32nd edition lists the title without quotes. Three print sources, three no-quotes. Wikipedia should follow the scholarship. Dekkappai (talk) 20:34, 16 April 2008 (UTC)
• Support. Good case made by nominator IMO, further evidence supports too. Andrewa (talk) 21:10, 16 April 2008 (UTC)
• Okay, someone e-mailed me about this and I figured it's worth my coming out of hiding. The title of the movie is where the article sits - "scholarship," as it were, has no actual consistent titling on this (and I'd go as far as to say Cocaine Fiends is overtly incorrect in its titling, but I digress), and discussion at the time of creation was that the best move was to keep it at the actual title and be generous and plentiful with the redirects. The official title, as is on all the posters and promotional materials, many of which I own in my own personal collection and are in the public domain for anyone to refer to, is within the quotes - hell, the trailer is right here for anyone to see. If people are going to simply play a consensus game because they want to run with the suggestions at the naming convention policy (and they are suggestions, read the policy closely), then they do so at the peril of Wikipedia's accuracy. The article passed a GA review and an FA review without the quotes being at issue, so consider this situation wisely. The title can be verified at this current position, it's an honest assessment. Feel free to e-mail me if you have any further questions, but this entire discussion seems a little nonsensical - either you're interested in accuracy or you're not. --Badlydrawnjeff (talk) 23:09, 16 April 2008 (UTC)
  • Thanks for the input, Jeff. First of all-- they're just quotes, it's the article that is important, quotes or no... Now, about the accuracy. I may very well side with including the quotes if it's shown that the quotes are meant to be a part of the title-- as opposed to just being put on the posters and advertising materials, which was a convention at the time. What sources do you have that show that the official title specifically included quotes? Dekkappai (talk) 23:17, 16 April 2008 (UTC)

And as I've excerpted above, several conventions disagree with your assertion that accuracy is paramount to the needs of the encyclopedia. Indeed, there are many cases where it is either impractical or undesirable to conform perfectly to the "real" name of an article subject. e.g., The Wizard of Oz (1939 film) is also not an accurate title, but it serves our needs properly. I've shown not one but several places where this is supported within the guidelines, and the guidelines themselves are a manifestation of consensus; therefore, if you're simply going to use the argument that guidelines can be ignored, you're going to have to show exceptional circumstances to justify it. Girolamo Savonarola (talk) 23:53, 16 April 2008 (UTC)

That you're using a disambiguation as an example of how the naming conventions apparently "serve our needs" is the height of ridiculousness. If you want an inaccurate title, knock yourself out - the naming conventions surely aren't designed to promote inaccuracy. As for the sources, I'm looking at the official press materials from Hallmark as guidance here. Compare it with Mom and Dad, which also has quotes around the title on the poster we have here, yet is not referred to in the primary materials with those quotes the way SSSN is. --Badlydrawnjeff (talk) 02:44, 17 April 2008 (UTC)

Thanks for calling me ridiculous. I appreciate the good faith. Girolamo Savonarola (talk) 04:37, 17 April 2008 (UTC)

The above discussion is preserved as an archive of the proposal. Please do not modify it. Subsequent comments should be made in a new section on this talk page. No further edits should be made to this section.

Questions of accuracy

I suggest that those who are arguing on grounds of accuracy above have a good read of Wikipedia:naming conventions for what is relevant here, and linguistic prescription for what is not. You might also have a look at Wikipedia:official names which is still just at the discussion stage but might help.

To summarise, Wikipedia article names follow current common English usage, whether accurate or not in terms of any particular authority. That's a policy, not just a guideline, and it catches many people by surprise. In the article content, yes, we're very concerned with accuracy. But as to what to call the article, we go by usage, with very few exceptions, and those are nearly all in order to resolve some ambiguity in usage. Andrewa (talk) 00:30, 17 April 2008 (UTC)

And that, frankly, is stupid. If the policies are forcing us to use inaccurate titling, then there's a grave problem with the policy, but that shouldn't come as a shock to any WP veteran. --Badlydrawnjeff (talk) 02:44, 17 April 2008 (UTC)

I respect your position, and suggest you try in turn to understand the position that others have taken in agreeing to this policy. I'm happy to discuss it, perhaps on our user talk pages? Then, if you still think the policy could be improved, raise it in a suitable forum. But meantime, I'm afraid many decisions are going to be made in compliance to the existing policy. That's what the policy is for. Andrewa (talk) 03:12, 17 April 2008 (UTC)

• To clarify my position: I agree with Jeff as to accuracy vs. "rules". If the quotes are, indeed, part of the official title, I say to hell with the "rules" and put those quotes in our title too. To intentionally disregard accuracy in obedience to "the rules" would be absurd. However, I just don't see the evidence that the quotes were meant to be a part of the title, as opposed to just a convention in advertising materials at the time. I did find some web pages that included the quotes, without quoting other films, but the print sources-- at least the ones I found-- all had no quotes. Dekkappai (talk) 02:53, 17 April 2008 (UTC)
  • And of course, one of Wikipedia's most fundamental policies is ignore all rules: If a rule prevents you from improving or maintaining Wikipedia, ignore it. Andrewa (talk) 03:12, 17 April 2008 (UTC)
  • Dekkappai's comment above seems a very reasonable one. Beyond that, I'll say that while I usually have a much greater respect for accuracy and a much lesser respect for people's expectations than do some of WP's naming policies, I have some reservations about what could be termed accuracy in naming. Consider the article on the pop group Ellegarden: until I got to it, it was ELLEGARDEN and most of the songs, etc, had WACky JAPAneSE CAPITaliZATION. (I see that the latter has made a slight reappearance.) Now look at the list of concerts by another Japanese popster. This is the kind of silliness (uh, "accuracy") that a lot of people want, and merely because it's the whim of some marketer or graphic designer somewhere, a whim that's assiduously followed by obsessed fans and so forth, often all in the name of accuracy. Clearly a lot of titles that aren't in quotes (e.g. Give 'em Hell, Harry!) are in fact quotes or speech acts or similar; I'd be inclined to leave quotation marks off any of them. An exception would be quotation marks for very deliberate ironic or other effect, e.g. some (hypothetical) movie whose posters advertised it as "The President" and which was clearly about a decoy or similar. ¶ Question for those who want the quotation marks stripped off the title of this article: do the quotation marks cause any confusion? Why the urgency in the title change? -- Hoary (talk) 04:13, 17 April 2008 (UTC)

The quotations cause basic problems in the wiki software, including search errors and other problems caused by "special characters". There's no urgency anymore than there is for most anything else on the wiki, but there's no reason not to do it now either. This is the second time I've attempted to change the article title and been reverted unilaterally despite having thorough guidelines to back my actions; I figured it would just be better to get a consensus and all walk away with a somewhat more definitive conclusion.

I would also like to say that if users have a problem with the guidelines, then this is not the place to make your stand on the matter. No one agrees 100% with the MOS, but I'm happy to comply with it - and when I have significant objections, I take them there instead of blaming editors for actually being diligent about following what the encyclopedia MOS outlines. The guidelines, however, do say several times that accuracy is desirable but not paramount, so perhaps it would be worth spending some time investigating why this is the case instead of excoriating other editors who didn't write the guideline, Jeff. Regards, Girolamo Savonarola (talk) 04:27, 17 April 2008 (UTC)

Dekkappai's comment is indeed reasonable, but it's also reasonable to follow the naming conventions prima facie. This particular policy is one of the most discussed, and one of the most often ignored... many days on WP:RM, more than a third of the nominations are on the grounds that the official name has changed. Some of these succeed for other reasons, but it's very, very rare for one to succeed on the grounds that the official name should be preferred to the common name. And this represents quite an investment of everyone's time in discussing and re-discussing this particular policy, and without really achieving much, as in the longer term the policy is remarkably well adhered to.

I'd be very happy to have it change, but I see no hope of it. I'm told there was recently an attempt to change it on French Wikipedia, where you'd think there was a better chance owing to the existence of a single authority on French symantics and grammar, which English of course lacks, and it particularly concerned scientific names, which again you'd think would be not very controversial. But my informant thinks it's going to fail even there.

By all means, join in the discussion at Wikipedia talk:official names, which I set up just for that purpose, or even at my more general discussion page at User talk:Andrewa/systematic names. Andrewa (talk) 06:21, 17 April 2008 (UTC)

Just a comment in response to the above "Take it to the guidelines" suggestion... Guidelines (last I checked, and I admit I don't check them often, preferring researching and writing to rule-making-- and whenever I find myself involved with the latter more than the former, I find myself wanting to leave Wikipedia for good...) said they were to be taken with common sense and the occasional exception. Now the implementation of the common sense and the occasional exception, it seems to me, is most appropriate on the talk page of the article in question. Otherwise the general guidelines would be swamped with each and every exceptional case. Now, again, about this particular case: I found it mentioned in another good print source, and, no quotes again... HoARy's COMMent AbOUT waCKy JaPANEse caPITalizATion (OK, I'll stop) does give me pause to consider. However I think it's basically a different case, because it's not an "occasional exception" but a wide-spread practise in Japanese usage English in titling. So the Japanese titling does require a guideline statement to give us a uniform way to handle these titles. But the authors of this film (if indeed they had specifically intended quotes to be a part of the title) would have been doing something intentionally exceptional. And an exception in the rules would be proper... However, again, I see no quotes... Dekkappai (talk) 16:09, 17 April 2008 (UTC)

More on quotes

I decided to check some contemporary sources on this... Variety has a review of the film, published August 31, 1949. It gives the Wild Weed title, and does not mention the "She Shoulda Said No" alternate title, which, according to our article, came later. (It might be worth mentioning that the Variety review puts quotes around "Wild Weed" within the review, as it does with all films.) The New York Times, on January 31, 1957, mentions She Shoulda Said So [sic] as part of a double-bill with Mom and Dad. Quotes are around the title, as they are with all other films reviewed by The New York Times... No double-quotes or anything to note that the title is unusually-quoted. So, again, after a lot of looking around, I just don't see any evidence that the quotes in the poster and promotional materials are anything but the conventional quoting-practise of the time. Dekkappai (talk) 17:52, 17 April 2008 (UTC)

Image problems

At present, the article contains two Commons-hosted images that have been nominated for deletion:

• File:She Shoulda Said No!.jpg (green background). This was originally on Wikipedia as a fair-use image, but became liable to deletion in July 2008 as an orphaned fair-use image. A few hours after this tag was put on it, a now-inactive editor tagged it as public domain (diff for admins), replacing all previous details. It was then transferred to Commons without anyone realising the history.
• File:Image The Devil s Weed.jpg (red text). The same thing, except the original file here was File:The Devil's Weed.jpg.

I will undelete the local deleted images and then ask Crisco 1492 or any passing image guru to check the non-free rationales. Bencherlite^Talk 12:42, 24 January 2017 (UTC)

We hope has, I think, sorted out the issues at Commons (save for the pending deletion requests, where I have asked the nominator to revisit) so I have relinked to the Commons images. Bencherlite^Talk

Have done the Commons work and they are both PD-not renewed. If need be and this doesn't work out in time, I can re-fur and re-license the images which are still here-just let me know. :) We hope (talk) 16:17, 24 January 2017 (UTC)

User:Bencherlite Both closed as kept and the nominator has withdrawn both DRs at Commons. :-D We hope (talk) 16:37, 24 January 2017 (UTC)

Featured article?!?

I find it very hard to believe this is a featured article. The lead is short, several of the references are unreliable (Amazon.com and JoeBobBriggs) and others are dead. The "production and development" section is also much bigger than the other sections. Overall, this article just doesn't fit the FA criteria, in my eyes. Taylor Trescott - ^{my talk} + _{my edits} 21:40, 14 September 2013 (UTC)

The FAR nom that was initiated immediately after this notice has been placed on hold to allow time for interested editors to reply. Dana boomer (talk) 22:08, 14 September 2013 (UTC)

?!?, indeed. See [1]. zzz (talk) 14:07, 25 January 2017 (UTC)

Thanks for a great article!

I know a lot of effort goes into work like this! Thank you! (By the way, does anyone know what 'Stay up or stay dumb' means? I've never heard 'stay up' in that context... Cheers Chris vLS (talk) 04:11, 25 January 2017 (UTC)