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Great—thanks! I have Assistant Librarian coming through ILL but it's taking a while. We'll also want to add reliable, secondary source citations for all claims in the article or remove them (for now) until we can. czar00:23, 23 July 2024 (UTC)[reply]
Hi Czar - I've added a digital link to the Bookseller article from The British Newspaper Archive - ditto very slow and clunky but it seems to work, off to Peace News now More later Mornington Glory (talk) 09:44, 25 July 2024 (UTC)[reply]
Sadly the Peace News archive only goes back to December 2000, therefore not possible to have a digital link
I expect someone had a photocopy - remember those? of the article, it may be in the Grass Roots archive at Manchester Archive or held with the article in the North West Labour History Society journal (less likely)
Ah, how did you know what was in it without a copy? I can request it via the library but we would just need the full citation (issue, page number, section name). czar14:23, 25 July 2024 (UTC)[reply]
Thanks Czar - the article was compiled by several people, and over a slightly drawn out schedule, I haven't physically checked every citation as I have known and trusted the other contributors for a long time. Do you have any other suggestions re the Peace News quote?
I've added a citation to a CUP History of the Book in Britain - did it manually so I could get the page number in: " Indeed one of the earliest radical bookshops, founded in Manchester in 1971, was called Grassroots.” the name is wrong but same shop. Hope that adds a tick in the notability query Mornington Glory (talk) 11:21, 31 July 2024 (UTC)[reply]
I found Peace News at a nearby academic library but before I make the trip/investment to travel, it's occurring to me that there unfortunately might not be enough content here to support a dedicated article. There doesn't appear to be three instances of significant, in-depth, independent coverage of the bookshop. The most in-depth sources (several by Walker and Devine) are affiliated with the bookshop and therefore not independent sources. Those primary sources are meant to fill in the cracks between a base of reliable, secondary sources, but we do not appear to have any here. The other citations appear to only mention the bookshop in passing. As a tertiary source, Wikipedia paraphrases what reliable, secondary sources have said on a topic, so if this the bookshop is covered in sources as, for example, one item within a history of radical bookshops in the UK, then that's how we should look to cover it, not as a dedicated article. Is that how it's covered in the CUP History of the Book? czar12:38, 31 July 2024 (UTC)[reply]
I'm very shocked that you don't think the Grass Roots entry merits inclusion/passes the requirements to be included in Wikipedia.
The problem is that people do not write in-depth studies of bookshops, nor do they do PhDs. They write books occasionally but I don't know any that are written from an independent source - always written by the founder/owner etc.
Yes the inclusion in the CUP History of the Book is brief:
"This quote is at the end of a paragraph about Centerprise’s local publishing and the Federation of Worker Writers and Community Publishers.
'These and similar achievements demonstrate how the radical book trade serves as the soil in which to cultivate the ideas which are essential for radical communities to thrive. Particularly in bookshops, there is a cross-fertilisation of ideas when the publications and the people who write and read them come together in fruitful conversation. Indeed one of the earliest radical bookshops, founded in Manchester in 1971, was called Grassroots.'
(It is written as “Grassroots” not “Grass Roots”.)"
It sounds as if a whole chunk of information history is going to be excluded from Wikipedia. Pre-internet independent bookshops were hugely important as hubs, meeting points and information distribution centres.
I would argue that the article as it stands demonstrates the role played by Grass Roots Bookshop as a part of the development of independent radical bookshops at that time in UK social/ political history. And serves as a example of how those bookshops operated.
Wikipedia does have many articles on Category:Independent bookstores. While each article is judged on its own merits, their coverage ranges from contemporaneous periodicals (news) to asides or articles in scholarly sources. Yes, few bookshops have Ph.D. dissertations but they also (1) don't need that, and (2) we don't use theses anyway since they're unvetted sources.
On excluding history and worthiness, I certainly don't think the topic is any less deserving than another—I edit primarily on books on Wikipedia—but there are some topics that are still awaiting further coverage in reliable, secondary sources and this might be one of them. To base an article on primary sources alone would be a form of original research, such as the claims in the article that synthesize between claims that secondary, independent sources have not made. Wikipedia summarizes what has been reliably published in secondary sources. So if Grass Roots is covered in reliable, secondary sources as as part of the development of radical UK bookshops, then we should cover the topic proportionally within an article on radical UK bookshops, etc. But we don't have much here on the development of radical UK bookshops either.
On keeping a dedicated article, that determination is by a consensus of editors and not me unilaterally, so either we find that consensus ourselves (which is why I'm suggesting alternatives to deletion) or we can expand the conversation to other editors. I'm just saying that based on what I've seen many times before, there are no core sources in the current article providing detail independent of the subject, which is our baseline for dedicated articles. If you'd like, I can invite other editors to weigh in.
Thank you for your comments, my apologies for the delay in replying.
on Category:Independent bookstores. I think Grass Roots Books is a good addition to the listing, representing one of the larger, out of London bookshops. As a community and political bookshop, it gives a broader and more accurate picture in Wikipedia of the diversity and range of independent bookshops trading at that time.
The Guardian newspaper article by Crispin Aubrey and Charles Landry, In Other Words: Shelf on the Left from September 6 1980, discusses GRB and includes an interview - GRB is used as an example of a bookshop which stocks work from the alternative press, a photo of GRB heads the article. This is independent of GRB.
The CUP book on the history of the book in Britain includes the mention of GRB in a discussion on the history and place of radical bookshops. Also independent.
I am not sure if there is anything more I can add.
Are you suggesting this article should be cut to a stub?
If we wrote an article about the Federation of Radical Booksellers and Radical Bookshops in Britain from 1960s to c 2000 could we include much of this material?
I'm not sure what alternatives I have in "alternatives to deletion" - maybe you could make some suggestions? I would appreciate your input.
There's absolutely room for Radical bookshops in the United Kingdom. There are articles in newspapers on them as a group, like this Guardian article, another Guardian one, this from New Statesman, etc. As far as academic history goes, here's an article on feminist radical bookstores specifically doi:10.1093/hwj/dbw002 - most academic work is going to be on some subset like this. I'm not sure what the best way to handle the historical scope of an article like that would be, since we could probably go all the way back to the 17th century if we wanted to, but I suppose that's a better question to ask of a more developed article. The Cambridge HotB chapter on the radical book trade in the 20th century is at doi:10.1017/9780511862489.028. I've also found a google scholar citation for Tranmer, Jeremy. "Taking Books to the People: Radical Bookshops and the British Left." The Lives of the Book, Past, Present, and Future (2010) - but so far I haven't found that book, so that might be a google invention. There might also be something fun in this. -- asilvering (talk) 14:50, 12 August 2024 (UTC)[reply]
By the way, I excluded the Ally Fogg Guardian opinion piece and found the Tranmer chapter (the book is French). czar22:13, 12 August 2024 (UTC)[reply]
The article on Grass Roots Books has been deleted? I'm correct in this?
Is there any action I can make to challenge this decision or can the two of you make it and remove the article? I had the impression that the next step would be to open the discussion to other editors.
The article on Radical Bookshops in the United Kingdom should be written by someone who knows about the subject, I can already spot errors which of course then become the history because they are on Wikipedia. Mornington Glory (talk) 11:10, 13 August 2024 (UTC)[reply]
Yes, it has been redirected to the wider topic. I posted to Wikipedia talk:WikiProject Books#Grass Roots Books and Wikipedia talk:WikiProject Anarchism#Grass Roots Books, hence the third party contribution above. I can open the article to a deletion discussion if you'd like a broader set of editors to weigh in. When I reviewed content to merge into Radical bookshops in the United Kingdom, I found that many of the sources didn't mention either Grass Roots or radical bookshops at all but were used to make tangential points. So there ultimately were only two non-primary sources that could be imported. You are more than welcome/invited to contribute to the other article, and welcome to invite others to contribute as well. In terms of errors, remember that our job is to paraphrase secondary sources, not to find the truth. If I paraphrased incorrectly, by all means fix it or point it out, but if the source got it wrong, we'll need another reliable, secondary source that says otherwise. czar13:03, 13 August 2024 (UTC)[reply]
@Mornington Glory, just to be clear on the terminology, the Grass Roots Books article has been redirected, not deleted - I know that from a non-editor perspective this is the same thing (ie, there is no longer any article at Grass Roots Books), but the difference here is that you can go into the history of the redirect and find all of the text still there: [1]. So you can go back in there to grab the text you wrote, give that link to others, etc. It's not going anywhere, it's just been made hard to find.
Right now the new Radical bookshops in the United Kingdom article is mostly a stub - very short, not really any extra info on any particular bookshop. We could convert the list into a series of subheadings and provide some information about each bookshop, and thus bring in a bit more about Grass Roots Books. Do you want to try that? We'll want to expand some of the other bookshops in that case as well.
Regarding errors that become history because of Wikipedia, we've got a whole internal article on that: WP:CITOGENESIS. You'll find that WP:@ folks are really attentive to this problem - if you can find evidence of this happening we're more than happy to help you ferret it out, wherever it's spread to across the project. Just let us know. asilvering (talk) 20:13, 13 August 2024 (UTC)[reply]
Oh, I should add: what czar has done here is called a WP:BLAR. What you can do to challenge the decision is revert that edit; it's that simple. Then we start a deletion discussion instead. Normally, I'd advise against this, since it could theoretically result in the article being deleted, as in, removed from the Internet entirely (and no page history to link to at all). But in this situation, since we have such an obvious alternative to deletion (just redirect the article back to Radical bookshops in the United Kingdom), I think a deletion discussion would be pretty low-risk. czar and I would both oppose deletion for sure. You might find that other editors are able to turn up more sources. You also might not, in which case seven days later we're back where we started. -- asilvering (talk) 20:29, 13 August 2024 (UTC)[reply]
