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Cosima Wagner article. This is not a forum for general discussion of the article's subject. |
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An editor recently replaced some proper interlanguage links with direct links, so I restored the use of {{ ill}} for those. I then noticed that the vast majority of citations are short citations, only a few used inline citations. In line with WP:CITEVAR and Wikipedia:Featured article criteria, I then converted those inline citations to short citations. A positive side effect was that the narrow columns in "Citations" worked as intended. This part of my edit was then reversed by User:Nikkimaria with an edit summary "refs". I don't understand the objection and suggest to restore the consistent short citations. -- Michael Bednarek ( talk) 04:04, 9 July 2020 (UTC)
Don't you agree that the list of citations would look better in a consistent short format?Nope, I think they're quite fine as they are and have been. This system is well accepted at FA-level. Nikkimaria ( talk) 20:39, 9 July 2020 (UTC)
An infobox was added - not by me - today, and reverted citing Talk:Cosima Wagner/Archive 1. Curious, I saw there an interesting discussion from 2012. The last comment, yes by me, was added a year later and basically asks if the "consensus" was still no infobox. There was no answer. Where are we now?
Infoboxes for people seems pretty standard practice in any well-developed article. They collect basic information - birth date and location,death same, spouses, marriage dates, relatives of note and so on in convenient quick guide that prose text isn't particularly suitable for. Now, I do think Honoré de Balzac's infobox is maybe a bit over-filled, but it is a pretty decent introduction to him. Adam Cuerden ( talk)Has about 7.6% of all FPs 08:07, 12 February 2022 (UTC)
because it makes it easy to spot disparitiesOr, put another way, it makes it easier for disparities to exist, because if there is information requiring updating all of a sudden it has to be updated in more locations. It also isn't needed to provide a link to an "official" website, and indeed gives undue prominence to such a site in cases like this one where that would not be a key detail. As for mobile, the present layout presents the first paragraph of the article first, above the image - this provides readers with a quick understanding of the actual significance of this subject, something obscured by a data-based template. Nikkimaria ( talk) 12:52, 15 February 2022 (UTC)
Cosima Wagner | |
---|---|
![]() Cosima Wagner by
Franz von Lenbach in 1879 | |
Born | Francesca Gaetana Cosima Liszt 24 December 1837 |
Died | 1 April 1930 | (aged 92)
Occupation | Festival manager |
Organizations | Bayreuth Festival |
Spouses | |
Parents |
The infobox proposed in 2012 was linked above. We are here because an IP added an infobox with data of birth and death only, not including the image. My proposal today would be this, which is in between the two. Her children became notable, so might be included, but let's try to be simple. Where could we meet? I'd like to say early on that she led the festival for 20 years (which the lead has in the second paragraph) but how? Her place of death - standard encyclopedic fact - isn't in the lead. -- Gerda Arendt ( talk) 09:50, 16 February 2022 (UTC)
The infobox proposed here is useful for a number of reasons. One is to make the basic information more easily accessible, especially to those whose mother language is not English. As (relatively) fluent English speakers we are privileged that so many people round the world feel the need to learn "our" English (or a version of it...) as a second, third or fourth or more language. It's a legacy of empire and not something that you or I - if English is our first language - have done anything to deserve. Another use of the infobox is to make basic information available quickly to people with a day job. Lots of wiki contributors seem to have all the time in the world. That's lovely. A lot of us are quite old, and we're all of us older than we used to be. But it seems more than a little arrogant to expect each and every casual reader with a couple of minutes between meetings to confront a great wall of (frequently curiously monochrome) wiki-text written by self, when all s/he wanted to know was where or when Cosima was born. We do not write this stuff for personal gratification. We do not write it in order to display to other (in this case) Wagner obsessives how clever we are or how much we know. We write this stuff for folks we never met who want to know more. And maybe we write it in order to learn more along the way. But this mantra about infoboxes being "inappropriate" to wiki-entries written for nice smart people such as ourselves about nineteenth century music celebrities seems, with some folks, to risk becoming an extreme psychopathy or a rather unpersuasive substitute for religion. It's very odd. But I don't think a blanket "I hate infoboxes" mantra makes wikipedia a better tool for communicating knowledge. Clearly I must be missing something obvious.
Discussion over whether her antisemitism belongs in the infobox is an interesting one and of course it's important to lots of our readers. And, I suspect, to most of us reading this. But conflating it with whether an infobox here will be helpful (or not) to some (or even to most) readers is an unnecessary attempt to tackle questions you weren't asked by whoever it wass that launched this discussion That's a device for the lawyers trying to muddle the evidence in order to befuddle a jury of "layfolk" under the Anglo-American justice system. In the present circumstances, however, the tactic is distracting and discourteous.
Ditto discussion of whether infoboxes would be better if they were differently designed and/or differently configured. To be sure, there's always room for improvement. That applies to (virtually) everything on wikipedia.
People - some people - seem bizarrely keen to stray from the question asked here.
Ho hum. Be well. Charles01 ( talk) 16:55, 26 February 2022 (UTC)
What point is there in discussing info-boxes with you as you are adamant that every article must have one, despite Wikipedia's policy to the contrary? If you can round up a posse of determined info-box warriors to overturn the consensus at FAC and the original author's intentions, so be it. Otherwise, please leave it alone and do something useful. Tim riley talk 20:44, 11 June 2022 (UTC)
It's been a year from now, should we requests for comment to conclude this discussion? -- 112.204.223.162 ( talk) 22:26, 28 April 2023 (UTC)
I added George Steiner's comment to the Archives section, since I thought that the notice and recommendation of an (impeccably respected) scholar whose contributions to Jewish Studies have also been noted, might (very, very occasionally) attract interest to the important source of Cosima Wagner's diaries as a historical primary source: They have opened up my understanding of important moments in a number of places, and I personally would never have glanced at them short of Steiner's stamp that they are more than worthwhile in terms of the attention of readers and scholars. User:Tim riley noticed that I had not cited a page number. I respect your vigilance here, User:Tim riley. George Steiner's comment appears on the jacket of volume two or even more specifically: It's from the blurb on the back cover. I could include the full quote but that seems unnecessary, and more like an advertisement for Steiner on C. Wagner's page which is not my intention here. Having searched, I assume this blurb was taken from a letter sent back to the publisher that is not otherwise published or available. So I leave it to you User:Tim riley --is this kosher or not? : )
I am asking other editors to decide whether what I regard as an obvious run-on sentence is good grammar. The dispute is about this sentence from the intro, consisting of two unrelated clauses: "They married in 1870; after Wagner's death in 1883 she directed the Bayreuth Festival for more than 20 years, increasing its repertoire to form the Bayreuth canon of ten operas and establishing the festival as a major event in the world of musical theatre." I regard it as a run-on sentence according to this sentence from WP: Per The American Heritage Dictionary of the English Language, the term "run-on sentence" is also used for "a very long sentence, especially one lacking order or coherence"; specifically, coherence is lacking between the clauses.
I tried to fix this sentence by splitting it into two sentences, a very minor edit. Tim riley reverted with the explanation: "Not an improvement. Rev to agreed FA version." This appears to be based on the principle that an "agreed FA version" cannot be improved, which I believe is not a WP principle. The question is whether the sentence can be improved. Please indicate votes. Thank you. Zaslav ( talk) 07:20, 14 November 2022 (UTC)
I agree not to call this a "run-on sentence". That is irrelevant to the issue, which is whether it is a good sentence (I do not think it is ungrammatical; I think it is illogical). Of course the two halves are related, as some replies noted. In fact, the whole paragraph is related. The only valid argument I see mentioned for leaving the sentence as is, is to avoid "[h]aving a four-word sentence". What bothers me is the 13-year gap during which, one might think (as I did when reading it), nothing worth mentioning happened; the purpose of splitting the sentence is to avoid that impression. To me, the logical connection is between "in 1863 Cosima began a relationship with Wagner, who was 24 years her senior" and "They married in 1870". After years of marriage he died; then "after Wagner's death in 1883 she directed the Bayreuth Festival for more than 20 years, increasing its repertoire to form the Bayreuth canon of ten operas and establishing the festival as a major event in the world of musical theatre", which is not a short sentence in itself and has a lot of closely related information. I suggest the following, which groups closely related information: "Although the marriage produced two children, it was largely a loveless union, and in 1863 Cosima began a relationship with Wagner, who was 24 years her senior; they married in 1870. After Wagner's death in 1883..." Zaslav ( talk) 03:33, 19 November 2022 (UTC)
A lot of fuss about nothing as far as I can see. The text is perfectly OK as it is. And it correctly suggests that until the death of Wagner, Cosima was not involved in running the Bayreuth Festival, her role was essentially domestic.-- Smerus ( talk) 10:36, 19 November 2022 (UTC)
With regards to this edit: short descriptions should be short, but not at the expense of fulfilling the purpose of the description, and dates are encouraged only when they enhance the short description. The previous description was by far superior in identifying the subject of the article, including why people are likely to know her, and that information takes precedence from the date ranges per SDDATES. Nikkimaria ( talk) 00:02, 29 April 2023 (UTC)
The date says 1979 in the caption. Surely it should be as in the infobox in the discussion above: Cosima Wagner by Franz von Lenbach in 1879
https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Cosima_Wagner_Lenbach_(crop).jpg
This is the
talk page for discussing improvements to the
Cosima Wagner article. This is not a forum for general discussion of the article's subject. |
Article policies
|
Find sources: Google ( books · news · scholar · free images · WP refs) · FENS · JSTOR · TWL |
Archives: 1 |
![]() | Cosima Wagner is a featured article; it (or a previous version of it) has been identified as one of the best articles produced by the Wikipedia community. Even so, if you can update or improve it, please do so. | ||||||||||||
![]() | This article appeared on Wikipedia's Main Page as Today's featured article on December 24, 2012. | ||||||||||||
| |||||||||||||
![]() | Facts from this article were featured on Wikipedia's Main Page in the " On this day..." column on December 24, 2017, December 24, 2021, and August 13, 2022. | ||||||||||||
Current status: Featured article |
![]() | This article is rated FA-class on Wikipedia's
content assessment scale. It is of interest to the following WikiProjects: | |||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
|
An editor recently replaced some proper interlanguage links with direct links, so I restored the use of {{ ill}} for those. I then noticed that the vast majority of citations are short citations, only a few used inline citations. In line with WP:CITEVAR and Wikipedia:Featured article criteria, I then converted those inline citations to short citations. A positive side effect was that the narrow columns in "Citations" worked as intended. This part of my edit was then reversed by User:Nikkimaria with an edit summary "refs". I don't understand the objection and suggest to restore the consistent short citations. -- Michael Bednarek ( talk) 04:04, 9 July 2020 (UTC)
Don't you agree that the list of citations would look better in a consistent short format?Nope, I think they're quite fine as they are and have been. This system is well accepted at FA-level. Nikkimaria ( talk) 20:39, 9 July 2020 (UTC)
An infobox was added - not by me - today, and reverted citing Talk:Cosima Wagner/Archive 1. Curious, I saw there an interesting discussion from 2012. The last comment, yes by me, was added a year later and basically asks if the "consensus" was still no infobox. There was no answer. Where are we now?
Infoboxes for people seems pretty standard practice in any well-developed article. They collect basic information - birth date and location,death same, spouses, marriage dates, relatives of note and so on in convenient quick guide that prose text isn't particularly suitable for. Now, I do think Honoré de Balzac's infobox is maybe a bit over-filled, but it is a pretty decent introduction to him. Adam Cuerden ( talk)Has about 7.6% of all FPs 08:07, 12 February 2022 (UTC)
because it makes it easy to spot disparitiesOr, put another way, it makes it easier for disparities to exist, because if there is information requiring updating all of a sudden it has to be updated in more locations. It also isn't needed to provide a link to an "official" website, and indeed gives undue prominence to such a site in cases like this one where that would not be a key detail. As for mobile, the present layout presents the first paragraph of the article first, above the image - this provides readers with a quick understanding of the actual significance of this subject, something obscured by a data-based template. Nikkimaria ( talk) 12:52, 15 February 2022 (UTC)
Cosima Wagner | |
---|---|
![]() Cosima Wagner by
Franz von Lenbach in 1879 | |
Born | Francesca Gaetana Cosima Liszt 24 December 1837 |
Died | 1 April 1930 | (aged 92)
Occupation | Festival manager |
Organizations | Bayreuth Festival |
Spouses | |
Parents |
The infobox proposed in 2012 was linked above. We are here because an IP added an infobox with data of birth and death only, not including the image. My proposal today would be this, which is in between the two. Her children became notable, so might be included, but let's try to be simple. Where could we meet? I'd like to say early on that she led the festival for 20 years (which the lead has in the second paragraph) but how? Her place of death - standard encyclopedic fact - isn't in the lead. -- Gerda Arendt ( talk) 09:50, 16 February 2022 (UTC)
The infobox proposed here is useful for a number of reasons. One is to make the basic information more easily accessible, especially to those whose mother language is not English. As (relatively) fluent English speakers we are privileged that so many people round the world feel the need to learn "our" English (or a version of it...) as a second, third or fourth or more language. It's a legacy of empire and not something that you or I - if English is our first language - have done anything to deserve. Another use of the infobox is to make basic information available quickly to people with a day job. Lots of wiki contributors seem to have all the time in the world. That's lovely. A lot of us are quite old, and we're all of us older than we used to be. But it seems more than a little arrogant to expect each and every casual reader with a couple of minutes between meetings to confront a great wall of (frequently curiously monochrome) wiki-text written by self, when all s/he wanted to know was where or when Cosima was born. We do not write this stuff for personal gratification. We do not write it in order to display to other (in this case) Wagner obsessives how clever we are or how much we know. We write this stuff for folks we never met who want to know more. And maybe we write it in order to learn more along the way. But this mantra about infoboxes being "inappropriate" to wiki-entries written for nice smart people such as ourselves about nineteenth century music celebrities seems, with some folks, to risk becoming an extreme psychopathy or a rather unpersuasive substitute for religion. It's very odd. But I don't think a blanket "I hate infoboxes" mantra makes wikipedia a better tool for communicating knowledge. Clearly I must be missing something obvious.
Discussion over whether her antisemitism belongs in the infobox is an interesting one and of course it's important to lots of our readers. And, I suspect, to most of us reading this. But conflating it with whether an infobox here will be helpful (or not) to some (or even to most) readers is an unnecessary attempt to tackle questions you weren't asked by whoever it wass that launched this discussion That's a device for the lawyers trying to muddle the evidence in order to befuddle a jury of "layfolk" under the Anglo-American justice system. In the present circumstances, however, the tactic is distracting and discourteous.
Ditto discussion of whether infoboxes would be better if they were differently designed and/or differently configured. To be sure, there's always room for improvement. That applies to (virtually) everything on wikipedia.
People - some people - seem bizarrely keen to stray from the question asked here.
Ho hum. Be well. Charles01 ( talk) 16:55, 26 February 2022 (UTC)
What point is there in discussing info-boxes with you as you are adamant that every article must have one, despite Wikipedia's policy to the contrary? If you can round up a posse of determined info-box warriors to overturn the consensus at FAC and the original author's intentions, so be it. Otherwise, please leave it alone and do something useful. Tim riley talk 20:44, 11 June 2022 (UTC)
It's been a year from now, should we requests for comment to conclude this discussion? -- 112.204.223.162 ( talk) 22:26, 28 April 2023 (UTC)
I added George Steiner's comment to the Archives section, since I thought that the notice and recommendation of an (impeccably respected) scholar whose contributions to Jewish Studies have also been noted, might (very, very occasionally) attract interest to the important source of Cosima Wagner's diaries as a historical primary source: They have opened up my understanding of important moments in a number of places, and I personally would never have glanced at them short of Steiner's stamp that they are more than worthwhile in terms of the attention of readers and scholars. User:Tim riley noticed that I had not cited a page number. I respect your vigilance here, User:Tim riley. George Steiner's comment appears on the jacket of volume two or even more specifically: It's from the blurb on the back cover. I could include the full quote but that seems unnecessary, and more like an advertisement for Steiner on C. Wagner's page which is not my intention here. Having searched, I assume this blurb was taken from a letter sent back to the publisher that is not otherwise published or available. So I leave it to you User:Tim riley --is this kosher or not? : )
I am asking other editors to decide whether what I regard as an obvious run-on sentence is good grammar. The dispute is about this sentence from the intro, consisting of two unrelated clauses: "They married in 1870; after Wagner's death in 1883 she directed the Bayreuth Festival for more than 20 years, increasing its repertoire to form the Bayreuth canon of ten operas and establishing the festival as a major event in the world of musical theatre." I regard it as a run-on sentence according to this sentence from WP: Per The American Heritage Dictionary of the English Language, the term "run-on sentence" is also used for "a very long sentence, especially one lacking order or coherence"; specifically, coherence is lacking between the clauses.
I tried to fix this sentence by splitting it into two sentences, a very minor edit. Tim riley reverted with the explanation: "Not an improvement. Rev to agreed FA version." This appears to be based on the principle that an "agreed FA version" cannot be improved, which I believe is not a WP principle. The question is whether the sentence can be improved. Please indicate votes. Thank you. Zaslav ( talk) 07:20, 14 November 2022 (UTC)
I agree not to call this a "run-on sentence". That is irrelevant to the issue, which is whether it is a good sentence (I do not think it is ungrammatical; I think it is illogical). Of course the two halves are related, as some replies noted. In fact, the whole paragraph is related. The only valid argument I see mentioned for leaving the sentence as is, is to avoid "[h]aving a four-word sentence". What bothers me is the 13-year gap during which, one might think (as I did when reading it), nothing worth mentioning happened; the purpose of splitting the sentence is to avoid that impression. To me, the logical connection is between "in 1863 Cosima began a relationship with Wagner, who was 24 years her senior" and "They married in 1870". After years of marriage he died; then "after Wagner's death in 1883 she directed the Bayreuth Festival for more than 20 years, increasing its repertoire to form the Bayreuth canon of ten operas and establishing the festival as a major event in the world of musical theatre", which is not a short sentence in itself and has a lot of closely related information. I suggest the following, which groups closely related information: "Although the marriage produced two children, it was largely a loveless union, and in 1863 Cosima began a relationship with Wagner, who was 24 years her senior; they married in 1870. After Wagner's death in 1883..." Zaslav ( talk) 03:33, 19 November 2022 (UTC)
A lot of fuss about nothing as far as I can see. The text is perfectly OK as it is. And it correctly suggests that until the death of Wagner, Cosima was not involved in running the Bayreuth Festival, her role was essentially domestic.-- Smerus ( talk) 10:36, 19 November 2022 (UTC)
With regards to this edit: short descriptions should be short, but not at the expense of fulfilling the purpose of the description, and dates are encouraged only when they enhance the short description. The previous description was by far superior in identifying the subject of the article, including why people are likely to know her, and that information takes precedence from the date ranges per SDDATES. Nikkimaria ( talk) 00:02, 29 April 2023 (UTC)
The date says 1979 in the caption. Surely it should be as in the infobox in the discussion above: Cosima Wagner by Franz von Lenbach in 1879
https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Cosima_Wagner_Lenbach_(crop).jpg