Talk:The Establishment: And How They Get Away with It

Summary of book's contents

I wrote a summary after reading this book in order to give the article a bit more substance, but it was deleted from the article. I undid the deletion asking for clarification of why it was deleted, but my edit was reverted with the comment, "plot summary is way too long and overwhelms the article. we don't write book reports here". I haven't found that particular guideline in any docs, but I have found a guideline suggesting that it is better to improve an article than to just delete stuff, so I would like another opinion on it. I'm not a particularly experienced wikipedian, so any advice is welcome. Personally, I think the summary makes it a better article, but maybe I'm missing something. Thanks. Mcgrubso (talk) 15:04, 25 April 2016 (UTC)

• I'm sorry to have cut your work, but in general, plot (or, for a non-fiction book, summary) needs to be concise and not overwhelm the article. There's some in WP:PLOT, though I know there's been some discussion on its applicability in various articles. Thanks, Drmies (talk) 15:47, 25 April 2016 (UTC)

Non-fiction books aren't really covered in WP:PLOTSUM which deals with fiction. By convention Wikipedia articles on non-fiction don't do a fiction-style summary of content, particularly not in a chapter by chapter way. That doesn't mean you can't describe the book's content and the author's ideas. See Wikipedia:WikiProject Books#Article structure for help on organizing the material into an encyclopedia article. StarryGrandma (talk) 17:21, 25 April 2016 (UTC)

I would say it is important that the content of the book be described. It is incongruous to move straight from two sentences in the lead onto "Reception". However, I agree that the summary added was far too long. It also seemed rather non-neutral in the way it repeated and positively portrayed the contents of the book. To add to that rather more clumsily, a good summary for Wikipedia would need much more "Jones claims" and "Based on X, Jones argues that Y" caveats, rather than such a large proportion of it being repetition of points raised by Jones. (The Iran comparison was one particularly glaring example.) MPS1992 (talk) 18:38, 25 April 2016 (UTC)

Ok. Not the end of the world, but I spent rather a long time writing it, so I feel it's worth discussing before accepting that it's just going to be binned. I can accept if the feeling is that the summary of the contents is too detailed but I'm struggling a bit to see how deleting the whole section improves the article. Each chapter of the book covers a different topic, which is why I split it chapter by chapter. Any thoughts on how to better organise it are welcome. Thanks. Mcgrubso (talk) 09:47, 27 April 2016 (UTC)

• In order to try to improve this article, and as WP:PLOT doesn't seem to apply here, I'm going to un-delete the summary and make a few tweaks in the process, then we can look at what can be trimmed from it to make it more concise. It would be great if anyone cared to help with improving it by re-writing anything that seems NPOV, or where it is not clear that the description is about the author's views, not the WP editor's. Thanks. Mcgrubso (talk) 17:33, 27 April 2016 (UTC)