From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Second image

The second image doens't really add anything to the article, it's a really crap angle and if it wasn't in the article I doubt you could tell what it was. Any objection to removing it? RaseaC ( talk) 13:07, 1 November 2009 (UTC) reply

Sections that read like advertising copy need rewriting

Under the heading "Styles", it claims "Certainly the most luxurious of materials is marble. In the past only the finest of rare colored and white marbles were used. Today many of those fine materials are no longer available, however many other beautiful materials can be found world wide. The defining element of a great mantel is the design and workmanship." This is largely nonsense. There are other materials that could be described as more luxurious than marble (say, porphyry or granodiorite with fossilized shell inclusions). Second, what evidence is there that "many of those...materials are no longer available"? Most materials that mantelpieces have been made from are still available. Finally, to claim that "the defining element of a great mantel is the design and workmanship" is just silly. It's as silly as claiming that "the defining element of a great necklace is the design and workmanship" when in fact, the defining element might well be costly materials (say, amber beads, processed as little as possible), or humble materials and rustic handicraftsmanship, but the product of artistic vision (such as the wire necklaces made by Alexander Calder). This kind of rhetoric belongs in advertising copy, not an encyclopedia. Bricology ( talk) 09:42, 7 February 2018 (UTC) reply

The whole thing looks like a cut and paste from an unnamed article in 11 edition Enc. Brit. Not a single paragraph has merit and I wouldn't know where to start deleting. In this case I couldn't justify calling EB, a reliable source. Perhaps the way forward is to start parking some WP:RS references here on the talk page and when we have a body of information, sketch out a stub- and delete everything above. ClemRutter ( talk) 11:00, 7 February 2018 (UTC) reply