Steve Norquist sends a new "after-story," related to Ed Allen's Wikipedia page, his false bio and a quote of E.A's view "of the internet as a 'giant bathroom graffiti. wall," while Stan Kelly-Bootle, making a note of "the vexing email-citation problem of clarifying who-is-saying-what-to-whom," (VN-L  Mon, 13 Feb 2012) recognizes "Wiki+Web as both primary (replica documents) and secondary (opinion/comment) sources, both needing careful cross-checking."

 

I want to endorse Stan Kelly's opinion since I surmise he is in favor of using the wiki and web for research, with the caveat that it's not yet sufficiently authoritative to dispense with further researches in the fields that its wide scope of information constantly opens and enriches. Due to wiki&web permanent atualizations it is possible to resuscitate long forgotten ideas and bring up opinions which remain pertinent to present day discussions in most academic fields. 

 

Jerry Katsell, responding to Nabokov and terza rima, inquires: "How well was Nabokov acquainted with Dante's terza rima in the original?" and, thanks to Wikipedia it's possible to discover that not only Dante's "Divina Commedia" has been translated into English and German (and probably in many other languages), by applying the terza rima pattern, and also (now thanks to google search), that Paul D. Morris, in "Vladimir Nabokov, Poetry and the Lyric Voice" wrote that "... Nabokov is demonstrated to have been an exceptionally stanzaic poet with a marked preference for the rhyming AbAb quatrain, although other categories from couplets to terza rima were also employed." 

Even though I cannot answer directly Jerry Katsell's instigating query about Vladimir Nabokov's familiarity with the Italian, there are little bits and pieces in the Wiki which may help to attend to his curiosity. 

My two-volume edition of V.Nabokov's "Eugene Onegin" (Princeton/Bollingen 1975) is, unfortunately, vexingly defective and many entries in its Index are impossible to locate within the corpus of Nabokov's text. This is why I cannot be sure that Jerry Katsell could find this information in the sections  where the Author discusses the "Onegin Stanza," "iambic pentameter," aso. Perhaps one day we might have access to this important material in a digital version!