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Am I really the *only* one to notice that this article is a complete fail? The article itself claims that the contest ultimately ended up with a winnowing down to a top 21, yet we are left to buy a Ouija board to figure out which of the 200 won that competition; apparently that list is a top military secret or something. — Preceding unsigned comment added by 71.212.12.92 ( talk) 17:14, 13 November 2015 (UTC)
Who cares? This is pop drivel, and if any reasonable standard for what applies as "information" were applied, this list would surely never be considered encyclopaedic. That Alexandre Dumas is not even in the top 10--and the list--including some in the top 10, is so heavily populated with insipid pabulum is a travesty. This list should never have been mentioned again after [or outside of] its publishing--much less enshrined in any kind of encyclopaedia to pollute the minds of the budding literati. — Preceding unsigned comment added by 184.170.70.57 ( talk) 03:07, 7 March 2021 (UTC)
I don't know who did this, and I'm not going to put forth the effort to figure it out, but I removed from the end of the intro paragraph the following:
"Please just delete the parenthetical above if the Wikipedian mania for citations and objectivity is so all-consuming that statement of the obvious requires documentation. (That is not what scholarship is about.)"
I don't have an opinion on what "scholarship is about" in this context, but Wikipedia is definitely NOT about putting editorial comments in the article itself! Felosele ( talk) 14:48, 16 August 2008 (UTC)
I have wikilinked each entry on these lists to improve the look of the page - unfortunately this has created a lot of redlinks in the Hungarian section. If someone knows of a bot which will remove all links beyond the first please direct it at this page and see how it looks - personally I think for list like this each entry should be linked. QmunkE 12:35, 5 March 2006 (UTC)
Are you sure that the quotation marks (which refer to literal translations of titles of books that haven't been published in English) should be included in the links? Even if the books should appear some time under those specific titles in English, they'll certainly not have the quotation marks! I think we'd better leave the quotation marks outside the link brackets. Adam78 15:54, 5 March 2006 (UTC)
A mess, links anywhere except the actual book. Skinnyweed 17:27, 13 April 2006 (UTC)
the bbc website says they recieved three quarters of a million votes, while the hungarian section of this article says that in britain there were only 140000 votes. where did the number 140000 come from?
—Preceding unsigned comment added by 172.142.176.194 ( talk • contribs) 22:18, 29 April 2006
The source is Index.hu, this article.
Translation:
Adam78 11:35, 30 April 2006 (UTC)
Personally, I think the German and Hungarian versions of The Big Read should have their own articles, to keep the British article small and everything cleaned up and organised. The Australian version ( My Favourite Book) has its own article -- why not them? -- azumanga 23:10, 8 January 2007 (UTC)
Does anybody think it would be worth the effort to add a category? It wouldn't be hard with AWB, but I think it would be slicker if we had the category "properly" sorted, e.g. The Lord of the Rings actually sorts to 001 - The Lord of the Rings. I can probably do it with AWB but not sure how people would feel about it. Please discuss. ;) — RevRagnarok Talk Contrib 16:25, 22 February 2007 (UTC)
Succession boxes for several entries on this list were added by Eldestone. I've invited Eldestone here to discuss this, as I disagree with the idea of having succession boxes for this sort of thing. Carcharoth 10:15, 2 April 2007 (UTC)
To Kill a Mockingbird:
The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy
Eldestone 10:26, 2 April 2007 (UTC)
I was invited to comment here by Carcharoth. I do not like these navigation boxes, especially for ranking how individual books ranked in a published list (because some books will be ranked highly in multiple lists, leading to multiple cumbersome navigation boxes). The navigation boxes shown here are specifically cumbersome for navigating among the books in the Big Read. I would simply rather see the book's awards listed in one bulleted list and the book's inclusion in various published lists given in a second bulleted list. (unsigned comment added by User:Dr. Submillimeter)
Eldestone, there seems to be enough consensus to replace the succession boxes with "ranked n out of 200 in The BBC's Big Read" comments. What do you think? Carcharoth 14:25, 2 April 2007 (UTC)
The Big Read is hardly notable enough for succession boxes. I hope these are dismantled over time. The Big Read is just one of dozens of such lists that come out every year in the press. It's slow news day material. I caution users from falling too in love with their favorite list and plastering it all over Wikipedia. This seems to be a common problem actually, the Time 100 list is another example. Fothergill Volkensniff IV ( talk) 04:06, 1 December 2008 (UTC)
Why is the Lord of the rings combined as a single novel (3: Fellowship of the Ring, The Two Towers and Return of the King) while the Harry Potter series is not combined? Fothergill Volkensniff IV ( talk) 04:03, 1 December 2008 (UTC)
Same goes for His Dark Materials which is condensed into one while Discworld and The Chronicles of Narnia are divided into their individual chapters.
(Years later.) These replies are reasonable and the BBC identification of 200 titles as novels may be reasonable but more explanation is appropriate if available. To this point we now say only,
In the unstructured first round, no doubt the public voted for many titles that the BBC deemed inappropriate, not only titles of Shakespeare plays and such as The Fellowship of the Ring and Harry Potter. Contemporary coverage of the first or second stage probably includes something about the intervening editorial work of culling and combining free-form titles.
Perhaps number 199 The Very Hungry Caterpillar represents a class of books that was otherwise culled. Or a gross oversight. -- P64 ( talk) 17:06, 31 October 2015 (UTC)
When this programme was on in 2003, celebrities plugged each of the top 21 books - for example, Ray Mears plugged "The Lord of the Rings", and Meera Syal plugged "Pride and Prejudice". Does any one think we need to have the celebrities who plugged the top books in the article? ACEOREVIVED ( talk) 21:25, 21 February 2012 (UTC)
There are five U.S. novels among the top 21 or top 25[*], if i clerk correctly -- ranking #6 (To Kill a Mockingbird), 11, 15, 18, 21. (* Top 21 and top 25 have integrity in different ways explained at the top of section 3.)
Number 20 (War and Peace) was published in another language and presumably read in translation by almost everyone who participated in the survey --if read at all rather than known by some adaptation.
More information welcome here and some welcome in the article.
(Moments ago I expanded the last paragraph of Little Women#Reception to be more explicit about the three 21c. surveys cited. The Big Read is first [of those] and we now say it was "ranked number 18 ... fourth-highest among novels published in the U.S."). -- P64 ( talk) 03:13, 27 October 2015 (UTC)