Template:Did you know nominations/Le Dernier Homme

The following discussion is an archived discussion of the DYK nomination of the article below. Please do not modify it. Subsequent comments should be made on the appropriate discussion page (such as this nomination's talk page, the article's talk page or Wikipedia talk:Did you know), unless there is consensus to re-open the discussion at this page. No further edits should be made to this page.

The result was: promoted by Crisco 1492 (talk) 16:08, 7 October 2011 (UTC)

Le Dernier Homme

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• ... that Jean-Baptiste Cousin de Grainville's 1805 novel Le Dernier Homme (The Last Man) was the first work of modern speculative fiction to describe the end of the world?

Created/expanded by Herostratus (talk). Self nom at 16:33, 30 September 2011 (UTC)

(Not sure where to put this, but I reviewed "So Long Self", a September 25 nom) Herostratus (talk) 17:58, 1 October 2011 (UTC)

Hook review

Format	Citation	Neutrality	Interest

Article review

Length	Newness	Adequate citations	Formatted citations	Reliable sources	Neutrality	Plagiarism

• Date of creation, length, and referencing check out, except for the plot section. As I understand it, it's ok for plots to be unreferenced, but the style of the writing there caused me to dig very thoroughly for possible copyvio, and I think it's too close to this on Amazon:

  This work contains Volumes I and II of the original work: The Last Man, or Omegarus, and Syderia: A Romance in Futurity. While traveling in Syria, a young man finds a cave, wherein a spirit appears before him. This spirit tells about the destruction of mankind and how the last days of man are restored on the side of a magical mirror. The last occupants of the universe are a young handsome man, Omegarus, and his beautiful companion, Syderia. Omegarus' father was the king of Europe, but as less and less children were born, the land became nearly void of people. After his parents' death, a vision told Omegarus of the only other survivor, Syderia. The pair are the last hope for mankind. However, man has exhausted his time on earth. The earth is destined for demolition. The hand of Death is coming forth to claim his victims, and Syderia falls beneath his hand. Only Omegarus is left. But for how long?

  Otherwise, I didn't find any signs of overly close paraphrasing, and the hook statement is referenced in both sources (which surprised me, for such a categorical claim). It's also interesting enough and short enough. So if the plot summary is rewritten in less poetic language to remove any suggestion it's drawing its wording from somewhere else (for all I know Amazon is borrowing from the article here, but it's also a bit flowery compared to the rest of the article), I see no reason not to check this off. Yngvadottir (talk) 18:39, 3 October 2011 (UTC)
  • OK, I cut it down to a short stub, is this OK? My sources for the plot summary were 1) Amazon, as you noted, 2) a fairly lengthy description in the French Wikipedia (http://fr.wikipedia.org/wiki/Le_Dernier_Homme_%28Grainville%29 here) which I can't read French but got some points from a machine translation, and 3) the original version of the article about the author (Jean-Baptiste Cousin de Grainville), which actually had a rather different description (there are light-fearing cannibals, and whether Omegarus is dead at the end is unclear). None of these are sourced, except that the French Wikipedia article as a whole is sourced to an 1811 (!) issue of Mercure de France. Anyway, I'm satisfied that the very short summary is accurate. (P.S. and FWIW, the flowery language is not lifted from elsewhere, I just write like that -- "writhes in despair", "stricken with terror" etc. was original.) Herostratus (talk) 18:24, 4 October 2011 (UTC)

• Yup, that got rid of the resemblance. I found the Mercure de France article (and note that the fr.wikipedia plot summary kipes from it liberally, sigh), cited it fully with GoogleBooks link, and used it to flesh out the summary just a little (since I haven't read the book!). Article is still long enough and is now good to go.

• Thanks. Did not even consider that the Mercure de France article from 1811 would be available. Great. Herostratus (talk) 05:29, 5 October 2011 (UTC)